By Sam Grange, Senior Knowledge Engineer, iManage.
Standards and structure matter a lot. This article is composed of words that combine to form sentences, which can be grouped to form a paragraph. According to widely accepted conventions, these and other linguistic devices provide meaning and clues as to what is being said within or when one thought connects or flows into another.
Without that normalisation and the existence of language conventions, comprehension would be significantly reduced or impossible.
Language and knowledge
Standards have mattered in language for some time. We have been codifying the meaning of words for hundreds of years. While Samuel Johnson’s 1775 A Dictionary of the English Language wasn’t the first attempt to do so, it is one of the best known. Taxonomies – or systems for controlling vocabularies and structuring thought – are also nothing new. Organising books into subject order using a subject catalogue – a taxonomy – has been standard practice for hundreds of years. Indexes, both to taxonomies and within books, help us find what we need.
Between them, dictionaries, taxonomies, and indexes are the core of knowledge management.
Today, legal professionals must contend with much more than just an armful of books. The sheer volume of words they need to sift precludes manual retrieval. The formats in which information is stored are many and varied – documents (in multiple versions), emails, Microsoft Teams chats, meeting notes and much more. Yet every legal professional knows that these words contain knowledge, and it is that knowledge which is the blood coursing around the firm’s corporate veins. The better a legal firm’s ability to codify the documents it holds, the greater its power to index. So, it follows, the greater its ability to successfully retrieve information and utilise its knowledge.
This is where computers come in, playing their part in storage, indexing, and retrieval, and where taxonomies play a significant role in helping firms precisely retrieve the knowledge they require at any time.
The pain of going it alone
At present, we often see law firms doing their own thing when it comes to taxonomies. They will have their own way of structuring the corporate knowledge embedded within their documents. There are several disadvantages to the approach.
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