KM content that delivers: Learn from the experience of early adopters
Nola Vanhoy, Catherine Monte, Nina Platt — all law librarians
Legal profession has suffered in the last few years. Law school grads doing document discovery for low wages now.
Early initiatives: 1st generation intranets, “HotDocs,” precedent banks, deals database, early portal development. IT wouldn’t give them a database, so she put deals database into the library catalog!
West KM product.
Database of outside counsel and “top 500 clients.”
One of the things Nina was most proud of was a research portal based on MS Access and Coldfusion (later MS SQL), personalized to lawyers.
Brief bank. You get an initial bunch of documents, but then nobody adds to it.
When they used West KM, they got the documents because they pulled them out of the DMS, rather than relying on lawyers to hand them over.
Tagging: most people not good at it and don’t want to do it. Lawyers certainly won’t do it.
KM is 90% people and 10% technology. Change management is a huge part of it.
Important to have someone who understands what you do and will go to bat for you.
ILTA KM survey
Database of attorney skills
Database of documentation of the KM system
Should go from the problem to the tech solution. Too often, it’s the reverse. Some group gets excited about some vendor’s presentation, and that’s what gets things started.
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