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By Kate Simpson
Like many organisations, law firms have an odd relationship with information. They know information is really important, especially the really valuable stuff in people's heads: knowledge. But there's just so much of it. And because they know it's important they are loathe to delete anything (just in case)...
There are so many different kinds of information and knowledge that might be useful to a firm - from precedents and templates to past pitches and presentations; from client details and internal expertise location to current awareness; and from expertise found in journals and books to what's on the menu downstairs in the restaurant.
Multiple repositories and systems, multiple offices and locations, multiple content processes and procedures leads to an excess of information and knowledge - all of it potentially valuable, but much of it virtually impossible to actually find at the time a lawyer or information professional needs it.
What Have Law Firms Done?
No two firms are exactly alike but two approaches have broadly defined the last decade or so:
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Knowledge management (KM) - finding new and innovative ways to capture, share, re-use knowledge and learn from others. This has been hugely successful for some firms, but requires the involvement of the entire firm and not just a small sample of lawyers. With a lawyer's focus on billing for client work, spending non-billable time ‘sharing knowledge' can seem not only esoteric but also secondary to the firm's key competencies.
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Buy new/more technology - finding new and innovative technologies to help capture, share, find and re-use information and codified knowledge. And, again, some firms have seen improvements with new system implementations, but they haven't been the panacea, the magic wand, or provided the instant ease or simplicity promised by vendors
Even with these IT and KM investments in law firms, it seems the frustrations remain: I can't find anything. It takes too long to find what I need.
What is ‘The Answer'?
I'm not sure I have it. I do know that it's not going to be easy and may very well be quite messy too. No problem this big, complex or important is ever going to be quick and easy to solve - that's just not how these things work, as we all know.
However, the focus of law firms over the last decade has been absolutely correct: to concentrate on people and processes through KM, and on new information technologies and tools through their IT budgets. But maybe there's a third prong that's been missing from this focus? The messy middle: the content assets, the actual information itself contained in documents, e-mails, web pages, blogs, journals, books, video and podcasts etc. And perhaps there are good reasons why this messy stuff has been left until last: properly organising all of this has become increasingly difficult and more and more daunting as the data grows.
But a new phase is beginning. Or so it seems to me.
The huge investments for enterprise search - providing lawyer and legal information professional alike with a single search box sitting over multiple repositories and offices - have certainly seen great improvements in uncovering information within a law firm. And most deployments have been heralded as the Latest Great Thing (compared to what the firm had before).
Developments out there on the Web in faceted search (e.g. filtering a search for cameras by brand, price and resolution) have begun to seep through the walls of our firms and organisations. The ability to have the simple Google box, but with the opportunity to delve deep using filters as individual information needs dictate, has been revolutionary.
But we are in the early stages of the revolution. Enterprise search has started to uncover some of the mess that we didn't even know was there. As well as showing, rather too starkly, the mess that we haven't wanted to deal with over the years: the poor tagging of content with useful terms or even consistent terms across different repositories; the lack of rigorous info management processes to identify the valuable, useful and re-usable information, or equally, to identify the duplicate, out-of-date or inaccurate information.
It has to be said, seeing this unavoidable reality for the first time with the new search engine is sending firms into a mild panic. But there's nothing like a bit of a panic to energise people: law firms are now thinking and willing to invest in ways to actually clean and fix some of this information mess.
Reviewing and improving a firm's Enterprise Information Architecture (or Firmwide IA) through an information housekeeping initiative is becoming a priority.
What does that involve?
Processes
Well-defined and understood business rules and workflow for the firm's information and knowledge are essential components to Firmwide IA:-
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The content and information lifecycle processes of create, store, publish, find and re-find, share, and re-use
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The firm's KM culture protocols and best practices for codifying, sharing and re-using knowledge at the firm
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The supporting IT processes that help bind the systems and tools at the firm to the internal business processes.
Systems & Tools
New initiatives currently underway at law firms are:
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Next generation Enterprise Search technologies
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Metadata and taxonomy management storage and tools
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Data warehousing or other fundamental data re-architectures
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Re-developed user interfaces for improved usability and findability goals
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Business intelligence & KPI dashboard applications
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New intranets on new platforms (well, actually, just MOSS 2007)
- Text analytics and other cutting-edge search or content management technologies.
Information & Information Architecture Assets
Developments in these areas are looking positive but some overall vision or defined outcomes will be needed to ensure the projects being initiated meet key business goals:
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Metadata schema - decision-making and system integration
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Facet creation and taxonomy development
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Data cleansing and improvement activities
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Development of the IA vision and culture for the firm.
Governance
Although this can mean many different things to an organisation, underpinning the Firmwide IA with robust governance and an embedded understanding of IA and its role at the firm is essential:
- A multi-layered approach that takes into account governance of the data, the metadata and taxonomies, the content itself as well as the business and IT processes supporting the Firmwide IA
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Roles and responsibilities across the complete content lifecycle
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Document security
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Ownership and change control
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Ongoing maintenance and management of those layers
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Business goals and outcomes for information as valuable assets of the firm.
The benefits of investing in Firmwide IA and these four themes, may be broadly stated as:
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Finding stuff - that includes not just finding what you actually need but also that which you didn't know you needed (the serendipitous bit of research), and to do so quickly and easily
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Leveraging the firm's information as an asset - taking information from being a simple resource to be used and discarded by the firm, to becoming a central part of the organisation allowing for optimised business intelligence and KPI reporting within the firm
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Avoiding risk - improving the accuracy, reliability and credibility of the firm's valuable information to mitigate the risk in providing incorrect, out of date or unsound advice to clients. These improvements also encourage wider buy-in and participation in the creation, share and re-use of knowledge.
By finally connecting the ongoing KM and IT initiatives with the information involved will result in a flexible, robust framework of data that can maximise further investments in new systems or optimise those systems already implemented and in need of redesign or upgrade.
What happens now?
Although there are very few specific Firmwide or Enterprise IA initiatives happening in our organisations, it seems that with new system or tool implementations, many of the activities listed here are, in fact, being undertaken. It seems that developing or improving an organisation's information architecture is taking place as part of other IT and KM initiatives and developments. This is good news for ensuring that bits and pieces of an Enterprise IA actually get delivered for an organisation.
However, the priority is now to be more coordinated and proactive:
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Rather than waiting until the brand new brilliant search engine exposes the problems in the data or document security, plan in time to undertake some of this information and document housekeeping
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Rather than doing bits and pieces from each of the four themes, plan in time to undertake some of the other IA supporting activities to help bring it all together.
Law firms fully appreciate that they are knowledge organisations, having created the roles and processes to leverage their knowledge successfully, and have invested in the supporting systems for that lifecycle management.
Now, law firms need to recognise that focusing on the third prong (ie. the messy middle) will maximise these investments in their people, processes and systems to deliver the tangible and significant benefits of Firmwide IA.
By Kate Simpson
Kate Simpson is a freelance information architect aiming to create the
most compelling user experiences, improve employee productivity and
communications and, with her specialist focus on findability, to help
people find the really valuable information in amongst their tangled
landscapes. Kate's industry expertise lies in helping legal and
publishing organisations with their findability issues, from Lawtel and
Matrix Chambers to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Simmons &
Simmons.
FUMSI articles by Kate Simpson »
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