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What Have Law Firms Done?

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'?

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.

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.

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.

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management processes to identify the valuable, useful and re-usable information, or equally, to identify the duplicate, out-of-date or inaccurate information.

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?

Well-defined and understood business rules and workflow for the firm's information and knowledge are essential components to Firmwide IA

Systems & Tools

Information & Information Architecture Assets

Governance

The benefits of investing in Firmwide IA and these four themes, may be broadly stated as:

What happens now?