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Last year just 7 percent of librarians mostly or totally disagreed with recent decisions made regarding the library. This year the figure was 16 percent. Similarly, in 2008, a mere 3 percent were dissatisfied with their job. In 2009, 8 percent were unhappy.

One might think that the library's continued work in assisting marketing efforts -- 62 percent of respondents said the library is their firm's main source for marketing research -- might upset librarians trained to research statutes and legal issues. But the problem isn't the work, say several library chiefs; it's the recognition that comes with it. Or more often, doesn't come.

Still, librarians have become tougher, more successful negotiators when it comes to renewing contracts with publishers -- thanks in no small part to the metrics they get from new tracking software.

now there's commercially available tracking software -- like Onelog, from the U.K.-based company Info Technology Supply Ltd., and Advanced Productivity Software LookUp Precision.

A third package mentioned by some library chiefs was Research Monitor from Priory Solutions.

costs for electronic re­sources other than LexisNexis and Westlaw rose in 2008, with the average firm spending just over $1 million, compared to some $929,000 in 2007. (Lexis and Westlaw spending decreased slightly.)

it's no shock that more firms are starting to ask a question that, up until now, seemed almost blasphemous: Lexis or Westlaw? Last year just 12 percent of firms said they intended to move to a single-vendor strategy. This year, 31 percent did.

Multimillion-dollar knowledge management systems were something that more than a few firms invested in. Newer platforms, such as Microsoft SharePoint -- which five library chiefs praised as a tool that made their work easier and three more planned to launch in 2010 -- just do it better. "SharePoint lets us splice and dice pieces of information, creating all these little repositories without going through IT or ten years of programming," says one library head. "You want to create a database full of Madoff stuff? There, it's done. And anyone can access it through a Web browser."

Five other firms gave a shout-out to Ozmosys' eponymous service, which helps them provide personalized news delivery to users.

Debevoise started using Ozmosys last September. Since then, some 500 of the firm's 750 attorneys have signed up for the service.

The Full Survey: The Librarian's Expanding Role Electronic Resources Staffing Finances

Alerts are another tool in your content control arsenal. Any wiki user may request an alert at the wiki or page level.

One aspect of SharePoint wikis that is not readily apparent is that each wiki page is a specially formatted Web-part page. As such, given the appropriate permissions, you can add your own Web parts to create a hybrid wiki page. At my firm we've used this trick, in conjunction with a custom workflow, to automatically add Web parts to each new wiki page as it is created

The adoption and use of wikis within law firms follows an evolutionary path from indifference to skepticism, to partial, then full adoption. The rate at which a firm moves along this adoption curve will depend both on how quickly legal professionals embrace the belief that collaborative authorship can efficiently produce high-quality reference materials, as well as how effectively technical professionals implement the tools for control and organization of the authorship process that lawyers demand.

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?

Now, however, a new generation of legal knowledgebase tools based on Web 2.0 technology (including PBworks Legal Edition, which has users at 24 of the top 25 firms on the AmLaw 100) is solving the usability issues and integrating the knowledgebase into the everyday work of a firm.

"At a time when clients are likely to challenge every item of charge, having efficient systems in place for producing work becomes vital," writes Karen Battersby of Nottingham Law School. "The transfer of knowledge from individual lawyers to teams of lawyers is also essential in a climate where lawyer redundancies are increasing and departments need to operate with leaner resources."

The first key is to make the legal knowledgebase easy to use. 

The second key to successful legal knowledgebases lies in searchability.

The final, and perhaps most important key to the success of Web 2.0 knowledgebases lies in their ability to integrate with the daily work of lawyering. 

"I can't emphasize this enough: making lawyers enter information multiple times is a recipe for failure," said Dennis Kennedy of Thompson Coburn. "Lawyers have proven that they will not change the way that they work.

While firms must restrict access to authorized users, they must simultaneously provide authorized users with access to information via different technology.  As more lawyers turn to smart phones and PDA, products must also include mobile access to the knowledgebase (including files) via Blackberry and iPhone to fully integrate with the way most attorneys actually work.

Over the last year, his firm has created three to four thousand pages in the wiki. Lee estimates that 60% of his employees make at least one change to the wiki each day.

Lee really likes the flexibility of the wiki platform. People can work in the wiki the way that they want to work. Of course, that has lead to some disagreements over the way to organize content.

Lee sees a conflict between the need for rules and the freedom to contribute. There are places where the wiki is not organized in a way that works for him. But it does work for others.

Lee also likes that the wiki is externally hosted. He lets PBwiki worry about keeping the server up and all the "plumbing" headaches. He wants to be out of the IT business.

One of his biggest issues is keeping the wiki in people's minds as a way to communicate. It takes some time for people to realize that they can communicate through the wiki. Lee still sees lots of email communication that could be better handled in the wiki. They are also still transitioning some of the content from Lotus Notes into the wiki.

The wiki is the first step of the firm's adoption of social tools behind the firewall. There are plans to roll out a firm-wide RSS infrastructure and an enterprise blogging platform, supported by a business case to simplify the publishing process for internal and external current awareness content

John outlined some specifics of the firm’s KM Strategy. The three primary prongs of their plan were an effective Document Management System (DMS); a way to manage precedents; and good DMS search.

They chose Interwoven for their DMS and adopted a unified “folder structure” as a way of fostering collaboration between practice groups.

For their search, they used comments from focus groups and the strategic plan to develop a 100-feature set of requirements, with each of the requirements weighted ranking from 1-5. Despite the extensive quantitative work, the two competitors, Recommind and Interwoven Universal Search (IUS), came out with an identical ranking. They went with IUS because of its tighter integration with Interwoven. John mentioned that Recommind did a better job of expertise identification, but that this feature was less important to them as a one-office shop.