Law Firms and Corporate Legal Practice - What They Are Doing For Knowledge Management

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LEGAL
Topics On The Page - Extranets - Filtering, Editing & Organizing - Products - Collaboration Tools - Intranets - Online Services

KM PROJECTS IN LEGAL DEPARTMENTS

Lucent Lead by W. Preston Granbery, Corporate Counsel, Law Practice Excellence for the Law Division, set out to increase collective learning. An information audit identified 3 goals: 1) provide means for the forty different groups within the 200 lawyers to share information; 2) collect and disseminate lessons learned 3) use more appropriate technology to communicate with clients They built communities of practice on their intranet pages, news regarding their practice with the ability for anyone to post announcements, ability to set up personal items of interest fed by web sites, and LEXIS-NEXIS feeds, electronic forms book, attorneys can post drafts, and if after review deemed strong enough they are added. An extranet was built for information for clients, too. [Source]

EXTRANETS

Legal AnyWhere Provides law firms with a secure offsite extranet to promote lawyer / client communications, at a reasonable cost. They take care of the general aesthetics and layout of the site and software support. Applications include customizable template software for general firm news, pages showing events and files for documents on specific matters. There is a client-accessible docket where you can post deposition dates, a place for drafts where clients can download, comment, etc. e-mail notification of those changes, too. Not a bad solution for a firm that doesn't have the technology support in house to do it themselves.

FILTERING, EDITING & ORGANIZING - Products

Correlate A windows product that helps you create work spaces called Solutions to capture information from desktop applications like Microsoft Office™, Outlook™, Windows Explorer and Network Neighborhood, Internet Explore™ and your browser, OLEDB databases and MRP, ERP, document management. Text, graphics, stock charts, and LEXIS results can be dragged and dropped into the Correlate work space, organized and then published.

NetMatrix Designed for use in a law firm incorporates work product, external resources from any electronic publisher, e-mail, web sites, etc. and permits one search capability across the sources using a Verity search engine, individual profiles to be set for e-mail updates on any of the trackers of external sources and calendering system.

LawTrack Organizes web, LEXIS and other disparate documents for attorneys and permits ability to send information to others in the organization. Web sessions can be tracked, annotated and also shared with others.

MeltingPoint (from Docuwork) A single interface to access all of your data, no matter where it is stored or in what program it resides, LEXIS research, scanned images, deposition transcripts, databases, spreadsheets, case management information, address books information, word processing documents, and more. Data mining application for lawyers.

COLLABORATION TOOLS - Law Firm & Client

TrialNet, Inc. Private, secure web site for a corporate client who pays a one time fee for construction and training costs and contains litigation documents, articles, expert witness information, and discussions. Clients are asking their law firms to subscribe. Requires the firms who work for the client to feed it.

INTRANETS

O'Melveny & Meyers International law firm, headquartered in LA. 620 attorneys in 6 offices. Infrastructure: Netscape Suite Spot running on Sun Microsystems hardware. Web servers and proxy servers throughout the organization. Content: Main page for announcements, links to practice groups, attorney directory, research database with links to web, discussion groups, recruiting section. A nice virtual library is also available on their web site. [Source]

Alston & Bird John Hokkanen, Chief Knowledge Counsel created a CD-Rom for building an intanet called Pure Oxygen. It runs on a Web server, end users use a browser, info is stored in a Microsoft Access database and indexed with an embedded Verity engine. Features: create new Web pages, attach subpages, text, links, pictures, and documents to those pages, search full text across the site, dynamic context mapping, a report of newly added items, and the ability to attach Internet searches directly to a Web page. You can restrict page editing to particular groups and the creation of restricted areas available only to the members of a particular group. Order form for the CD at no cost. [Source]

RESEARCH AND ONLINE SERVICES

Legal Research Network This firm provides an outsource service for your legal research questions to experts in the field. They farm out the work to one of the experts in their group and you can purchase the memo, brief, as you need. they also offer access to a database of work product.

Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP in conjunction with Westlaw scans in letters from the FTC, and their own work product dealing with interpretation of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act in the Antitrust area. These letters and work product are now a searchable database off the ML&B web site. Registration on the site for HSRScan™ is all that is currently required for use. The firm says their motivation was in part to partner with their corporate clients [Source]

OliversCases A product that will scan the various sites that house new caselaw federal and state appellate case law and deliver new cases that fit the practice area you chose to your desktop using BackWeb technology.