Taxonomy 101
Once again, I have missed my post date by two days – in defence, I wll plead that this post may make more sense now that Simon has posted on “methodological moires (someone will have to send me some instructions on how to create french language characters!)
Prior to implementing our firm’s document management system and portal, we decided to impose a firm wide taxonomy. To save others from correcting me, I acknowledge that my Oxford Paperback Dictionary defines “taxonomy” as “the scientific process of classifying living things” – so either I have a warped view of paper and electronic files or I am consciously mis-using the word.
In any event, the exercise of creating a taxonomy was challenging. It would probably have been impossible if I had decided to review carefully the ever-growing body of academic literature on the subject (I think that Simon was also referring to some of this material in his post). As I struggled to make sense of the material, I saw defeat looming on the horizon. Perhaps it was because this project was just one of many I was trying to juggle. Perhaps I have been living too long in the world of the pragmatic (ie law firms).
The end result was that I gave up on the academic or theoretical approach and focused on the real. Could I come up with a taxonomy (parts of which address client industries, legal services and legal topics) that was short enough. The length of the taxonomy became the ultimate issue – could the important elements be printed on one 8×11.5 page (double-sided) in print that was large enough to read?
In the end, after many compromises, the goal was achieved and the taxonomy was introduced (by the self- imposed deadline). It is far from perfect, but I learned some good lessons from the exercise. I will apologize now as there is nothing earth-shattering in this list. First, something is better than nothing (better to take one month than five months). Second, no matter how many people you consult, you won’t know whether the list is workable until people are actually using it. Third, once you’ve started down this road, you will find yourself developing taxonomies every time you touch something new. Finally, lawyers really like things to be simple. Test your taxonomy on someone who is too busy to be trained and see if it passes the test of being “intuitive”.
Hey, you can’t get away that easily. Let’s see the list! This is exactly the bootstrapping I was talking about, because we are all (even academics) enmeshed in a set of processes that keep running and leave little time for the ideal. So it seems to me one should never apologize for a product of pragmatism. But one should share it with friends…
No offence Simon, but sometimes these things are competitive advantage? I’d understand if Elizabeth was reluctant to display a firm wide taxonomy.
No worries, Steven. I’m quite prepared to be the naif when it comes to practice. Might it actually be a case of “my taxonomy is better than yours” or would it be more likely a problem about what a taxonomy would reveal of the firm’s aims and interests?
Law silos don’t make it easy to advance the state of legal practice generally, do they? And there I was, on the point of suggesting that we all share taxonomies and think about developing a practical (though p’raps more than a page long) utility version that could prove useful in a number of ways that the various catalogues and indices out there don’t.
How do others feel about showing us theirs?
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s bad form to share taxonomies, so don’t quote me on it. :-) But, my thought is that the development process can be long and time consuming, costing firms money. To post it here, and have some enterprising taxonomy artist (me?) scoop your work and improve on it, might not be fair.
I get the point that there are core facets that are common to most any law firm setting, but this is the public domain. Proceed with caution.
Still, re-inventing the wheel in each firm seems like a waste – maybe we should have a collaborative taxonomy space, to develop a basic useful structure that could be customized in private… imagine law firms collaborating in public – it might raise some eyebrows.
I’m up for that. While I think of how we might proceed, why don’t interested Slawyers email me with their ideas — or post them here as comments. Of the two basic questions — what kind of collaboration tool might we use? and what might we use as an “armature” to start to construct a taxonomy on — the former is easier for me. I hope you, Michael, or other interested readers have a suggestion about the latter.
Elizabeth, I’m curious as to the rationale for limiting the size of your taxonomy.
I have a taxonomy we are soon going to work on cleaning up. It is being used by our library, not necessarily going to be adapted for use by our whole organization although you never know. It was based a long time ago on another taxonomy, and then was gradually adapted over time for our organization.
One example of how we are going to further adapt it: it has the subject heading “leasing”. For a firm that does commercial leasing as a distinct practice area, this is inadequate for really helping to locate anything. To start with, we need to separate commercial leasing out from the other types of leasing. And then we also don’t want to have to look through ALL “commercial leasing” items that pull up, since that will be an awful lot. So, we need to create subheadings under this to give us more specificity (or “granulization” as the U.S. publishers say).
I don’t want to dissuade you, Simon, from your ideal of creating a basic taxomony we could all use. If you think of the KF Modified classification system for cataloguing that most of our law libraries are using, this might not be a bad idea actually. It might be a matter of creating the “master”, everyone creating specific areas, and then we could all pull from it and use as much specificity as we need.
Are there any non-proprietary taxonomies we could start with? What about adapting subject headings from KF Modified? Take what I say with a grain of salt–I am neither a cataloguer not an expert in taxonomy!
Too bad my project web site is on a governmental intranet, I would happily share with you the hierarchical index we are developping for our three areas of practice: Military Justice, Operational Law and Military Administrative Law (subject to my big boss approval of course…). They are at various stages of development. When all three areas are done, I estimate the entire index to have roughly 1,200 entries, providing the basis to manage our legal reference files – as opposed to client files.