Legal KM

Headshift was asked by this international Law Firm to consult and advice on a system that would help them share and access knowledge across different parts of their global practice.

After an initial survey of the company's communication behaviour, its culture and its user's requirements, we suggested a solution that had at it's core the customised use of the open-source wiki-platform MediaWiki.

Using a wiki platform, the international law firm made it easy to create and maintain "subwebs".

Using a wiki platform, the international law firm made it easy to create and maintain "subwebs". Subwebs are microsites on the firm's intranet, devoted to a specific subject such as a specialty within a practice or key client information. Headshift helped the firm explore how to broaden the participation in providing subweb content and how to move away from a process that required pages to be prepared individually in FrontPage, a web page design tool.

Headshift recommended an enterprise wiki platform, customised to feature dynamic navigation and designed to match the intranet look-and-feel.

The Dutch law firm Dirkzwager has become the first legal practice worldwide to sign up for the Legal Information Management Solution (LIMS) – Open Text's new Microsoft Sharepoint-based document management system.

The project will encompass both document and email management – and also see Open Text being integrated to Dirkzwager's Aderant practice management system.

After several years of running with Open Text (previously Hummingbird) as its DMS platform in London and Interwoven Worksite in New York, Clifford Chance has standardized on Open Text DM as its global document management system and is swapping out Interwoven from all its American offices

The Enterprise Portal System is a complete solution of enterprise integration, search, and user interface components designed to increase efficiency, timeliness, and quality throughout your firm.

The Enterprise Portal System extends SharePoint 2003 and 2007 platforms to fit the way your law firm works and the way you use information to drive client service and better manage your practices. You can combine separate systems into a consistent user interface within SharePoint and present information in legal-specific contexts, such as clients, matters, or practice areas.

Mark Gerow has more than 20 years of experience in IT, professional services, and software product development, and has provided consulting to hundreds of companies throughout the San Francisco Bay area and Northern California. He currently works for Fenwick & West, LLP, where he is responsible for defining and implementing the firm’s intranet and extranet strategies using SharePoint technologies.

Creating Client Extranets with SharePoint 2003 is a guide for creating client-facing extranets using SharePoint 2003. This book serves as a how-to for building full-featured extranets using SharePoint 2003 and .NET technologies.

In this article I'll discuss how Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (SharePoint) has been used at Fenwick & West to meet the challenge of making extranets available for each and every matter opened. I'll also cover the key issues that must be addressed in order to scale to thousands of extranets and terabytes of data. At the conclusion of this article you'll have a better idea of what can be accomplished with SharePoint at your firm, as well as a road map to get you started.

The key factors that I will discuss are:Automated provisioningAutomated administrationGranular backupTraining-the-trainersIterative refinement

Open Text legal solutions provide law firms with an integrated product offering developed specifically to support law firms’ business practices and proactive compliance needs throughout the matter lifecycle – from client intake through to final disposition: Conflicts Management New Business Intake Records Management Reporting/Auditing Document Management Legal Information Management Email Lifecycle Management

Lee Rosen, the president of Rosen Law Firm, took a few minutes to talk with me about his firm's experience with wikis.Rosen is replacing his Lotus Notes platform with an externally hosted wiki from PBWiki. You may have read about the cash prize contest he ran for his employees in a story on CNN.com: Boosting Teamwork with Wikis.

Lee was drawn to the concept of using a wiki because of its purported simplicity. He found it much easier to develop and add content.

The firm started with the free version of PBWiki and had their wiki up and running in minutes. Some of his administrators worked with the wiki for a few months to see its functionality and how it might work within the firm. Then others in the firm started asking to join and it took off.

Here are my notes on the second part of the following session on wikis in knowledge management. It covers a Sharepoint example.

This firm already had Sharepoint which offers a wiki so they made use of this option. The wiki use cases include: meeting management, project management, knowledge discovery and sharing, as well as knowledge management. The Sharepoint wiki provides ease of use. The categories work well and provide good ability to create them for wiki pages. The categories work like tagging. They also use RSS on all the wikis for updates.

There are currently a couple of problems with the wiki.