Well worth a look if you have a few minutes
http://prismlegal.com/a-brief-history-of-legal-km/
A Brief History of Legal KM
I am writing a book chapter on knowledge management and preparing for my 10th Annual Ark KM conference panel on ’10 Years Gone: From Content to Tools to Productivity’. To prepare for both, I wrote a brief history of legal KM in tabular format, below.
Beyond wanting to share, I hope to crowd-source corrections and updates. I welcome comments or email. My caveats about this table: limited time putting it together; relied on personal memory and experience; mention products by way of illustration; and wanted to keep it short.
[The Ark KM conference is October 22-23, 2014 in NYC. The link above provides more information. My co-panelist is Joshua Fireman, who also chairs day one. I am consultant with Fireman & Company; we partner with some of the companies that own products mentioned below.]
[Update, end of day, 4 Sep 2014: be sure to see the comment by Harris Tilevitz of Skadden, which provides more detail about the 1980s.]
A Brief History of Legal KM
Decade | Initiative | Description | Issues and Comments |
1970 | Brief banks | Collect briefs in binders and write a simple index |
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1980 | Work product retrieval – 1stGeneration – Boolean search | Find digital documents with keyword searches |
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1990 | Work product retrieval – 2ndGeneration – Smart search | Conceptual search (semantic engines) with better relevance ranking |
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Precedent collections | Find, sanitize, index high value, re-usable work product |
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Shared, outsourced precedents | Practical Law Company offers published precedents |
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Legal Intranets (~1995) | Legal-specific Intranets based on then new web standards (HTML and HTTP) |
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Portals – (~1999) – 1st Generation | Enterprise Content Management (eg,Plumtree and Vignette) |
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2000 | US law firms hire KM professionals | Firms begin hiring professionals to manage KM and experiment with PSL |
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Legal Portals – 2nd Generation | Specialized products (eg, LawPort) offer legal-specific portal |
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Work Product Retrieval – 3rdGeneration – Enterprise Search and Experience Location | Better search of work product by tapping multiple sources and using those sources for better relevance ranking (eg, Reccomind, Vivisimo) |
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Enhanced KM retrieval for litigation | Lexis and West products to locate firm work product based on citations |
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2010 | Collaboration and social media | Web 2.0 and explosion of social media trigger internal law firm experiments |
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Email Filing and Management | Advent of tools to automatically file and search email (eg, Decisiv Email) |
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Legal Portals – 3rd Generation | SharePoint and other tools (eg, BA Insight, Autonomy) allow more sophisticated, useful, and automated portals with search to populate content |
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Specialized practice tools | Deconstruct contracts (eg, KM Standards and Exemplify)Due Diligence (eg, DiligenceEngine and eBrevia) |
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Legal Project Management (2013) | Many KM professionals lead charge on LPM |
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Specialized Experience Location (2014) | Technology focused only on finding experienced lawyers (eg, Neudesic Firm Directory) |
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