Highlights Fom a Legal KM Conference in Sydney
David Fitch, Director of Knowledge Management Simmons & Simmons , who commented on Global Trends & Challenges for the Modern KM Directors--
- Uses several outsourcing companies for a number of KM/IS/BD related functions.
David supervises quite a large team for a law firm with 1,000 lawyers. 25 PSL (Professional Support Lawyers) and 20 Information Professionals - Doing more for less was apparent throughout his talk. Simmons & Simmons spend around $5,500.00 (pounds) per lawyer for KM/IS related resources
- Currently working with 2 additional law firms KM/IS and have collectively established a secure extranet for a banking client that works with all three firms. The extranet is currently hosted externally and does not contain strict and confidential documents. It is used more for current awareness content.
- Mentioned the IT challenges that come from being a global firm (looking for sophisticated systems that cover several languages)
Livio Hughes, Co-Founder, Headshift, Global Innovations in KM and Collaboration Focused Technologies--
- Stressed that firms work in an email centric atmosphere which has damaging consequences (bad for peripheral vision. We have in-box overload and are mechanically working through all the messages).
- Firms have been too focused on information storage rather than find-ability. Users often feel they are missing something when searching internal DMS systems
- Challenges- Users are fed up w/clunky desktop tools and expect more. (Why can they go home and use easy and intuitive apps like Google Search, Flickr for photo sharing and the like and not have similar applications at work?)
- Near Future- Internet has become the application environment with open source and personalisation
- "Simple Actions Tend to Create Networked Environments"
- Self interest drives up intake and growth of specific applications. Create networked individualisms, not centralised!
- What's the next big think in Collaborative Technologies? Attention metadata, social reading, writing and search.
- What firms are currently using collaborative technologies? Allen & Overy; Dewey & LeBeuf
Common themes throughout the day:
- Search and retrieval in many systems need to be intuitive and non-invasive . We're currently not meeting this requirement in many of our DMS and even web content management systems
- Make it simple!
- Collaboration is coming! How will we get our users to participate? We need to make it worth their while! (My thoughts- A presentation given by the Freehills Director of KM mentioned they rewarded their attorneys with extra bonuses and champagne for participating in their KM project, but what happens afterward? Will they have the momentum from the attorneys to maintain the knowledge work product?)
Links to products and consultants worth noting:
- XM Law - Was founded in 2003 by technologists and professionals with expertise in the legal and professional services industries
- Headshift- Take the best ideas and innovative tools and apply them to solving the real world needs of organisations
- Recommind- Solutions for e-discovery, KM, Enterprise Search
Links to Web gadgets mentioned: - Berry Bloglines- Open Source RSS Reader for a BB that works with a Bloglines account.
- Flickr- Photo Sharing
- Twitter- IM to SMS and chat. "To communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"
Labels: conferences, KM, knowledge management





