Legal KM - storing legal advice
The challenge of storing Legal Advice?
Many Legal departments and law firms have the challenge of how to share legal advice obtained through research around one particular Matter, and make it available for re-use by other attornies.
The biggest issue here is two-fold.
1. First, the format of the content. Much of the content is initially gathered through e-mails back and forth between inside and outside counsel, or research performed and not captured anywhere. Either way, the result can be a long string of e-mails - very hard to consume for a reader unfamiliar with the matter without some background and context, or nothing is captured at all.
2. Second, is the billable user base. The same problem that existed in my days at PricewaterhouseCoopers. You cannot build in process to capture content and expect billable personnel like Consultants or Attornies to do it, unlesss you can make it part of their normal business processes (or required) or if you make it billable back to the issue client as part of the admin of the engagement at the time. In absence of doing this, no attorny is going to be able to spend alot of time reformatting content or codifying legal advice gathered on a particular matter.
One solution is just capturing anything and everything; e-mails, e-mail threads, files, etc. Easy enough to mail-into a database or wiki and make searchable, but still incrdibly difficult to consume.
Has anyone done anything with Legal Advice?
Any suggestions on how your firm may have solved for this?
Many Legal departments and law firms have the challenge of how to share legal advice obtained through research around one particular Matter, and make it available for re-use by other attornies.
The biggest issue here is two-fold.
1. First, the format of the content. Much of the content is initially gathered through e-mails back and forth between inside and outside counsel, or research performed and not captured anywhere. Either way, the result can be a long string of e-mails - very hard to consume for a reader unfamiliar with the matter without some background and context, or nothing is captured at all.
2. Second, is the billable user base. The same problem that existed in my days at PricewaterhouseCoopers. You cannot build in process to capture content and expect billable personnel like Consultants or Attornies to do it, unlesss you can make it part of their normal business processes (or required) or if you make it billable back to the issue client as part of the admin of the engagement at the time. In absence of doing this, no attorny is going to be able to spend alot of time reformatting content or codifying legal advice gathered on a particular matter.
One solution is just capturing anything and everything; e-mails, e-mail threads, files, etc. Easy enough to mail-into a database or wiki and make searchable, but still incrdibly difficult to consume.
Has anyone done anything with Legal Advice?
Any suggestions on how your firm may have solved for this?
posted by Alan Baren at
10:54 AM
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