Blog Reports On Ark's 2008 Legal KM Conference

Written by Sean Hocking

Ark Publishers and Conference providers have just hosted their 2008 Legal KM conference in London. We didn't attend but Zeugma blog did and had some interesting comments to make about some of  the sessions. Their report on the day 2 workshop Future of Legal Know-how Provision' with Chris Bull, COO, Osborne Clarke, Carol Aldridge, Head of KM/IS, Burges Salmon, Simon Drane, LexisNexis, and Judith Pain (Head, PLC Property) on the panel will we presume be instructive for the bigger publishers. Paul Marhag writing for Zeugma reports: Chris (Bull) observed that how we use legal information will change: outsourcing of legal advice will become more prevalent; and the double digit increase pa in information providers' costs eg LexisNexis, has got to change.  Simon Drane responded.  Carol agreed with Chris, citing the shift her firm has made from LN Current Awareness to PLC's offering, and noting the problem with buying in knowledge and the overlap between that and internally produced knowledge.  Judith acknowledged this, and pointed out that law firms need to consider their know-how strategy, including risk, BD, HR depts, IT provision (eg where do they want IT risk to lie? an external provider can help with this).  Comms were important, within the firm and between external provider and firm. Questions from the floor indicated serious concern, in particular over clients being given LN or PLC content, and being aware that this was what was happening.  Carol agreed, and advised a cautious approach to the problem generally, particularly because law firm departments are becoming more savvy about breaking down IS costs within transactions.  One respondent said that in her firm the use of RSS with advanced search within the firms was in demand, and would mean less reliance on external providers.  Simon Drane responded by asking the audience what did lawyers actually want.  The respondent argued in return that the generation of good quality content was critical – that was the real market – not yet more expensive access to information that everyone already had. Chris's question clearly set the agenda for PLC and LN, and the whole discussion.  I have rarely heard such overt criticism of providers voiced in sessions.  The economic downturn is of course prompting re-appraisal of budgets, but there is more to it than that. Such re-appraisal often brings with it content audit, along with a greater awareness of  redundancy of content, or use-metrics by fee-earners; and this is prompting reflection on how external content fits with internal know-how.  There is of course the wider public interest point in having good access to basic law and more advanced finding tools than we have at present – a point that wasn't raised in this session, which concerned itself more with the operation of market forces between providers & law firms. Read more below Full Blog Review of Conference: zeugma.typepad.com/zeugma/2008/04/km-legal-confer.html Ark KM Legal Conference 2008: http://www.kmlegal2008.com/speakers.asp

 

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