The 7 Faces of Legal Knowledge Management

I will be speaking at LawTech Canada on November 16th in Toronto.

Although my talk may differ slightly from the paper I submitted, I ended up submitting a paper called “The 7 Faces of Legal Knowledge Management.” The paper reflects my current thinking on the topic of legal KM, influenced in part by discussions with colleagues in the industry. Many of us wear quite different hats as legal knowledge managers depending on the type of firm where we practice, our individual backgrounds and experiences, and staffing and resources.

The 7 “faces” of legal KM I identified are:

1. Document / Records Management
2. Precedent Development
3. Legal Research / Intranet Content Delivery
4. Professional Development / Training
5. Litigation Support
6. Practice Management
7. Client-Facing Initiatives / Alternative Fee-Billing

I am not aware of any particular individual in our field in Canada who is directly responsible for all 7 faces but many individuals come close, reflecting the fact that KM is not necessarily a single, discrete activity.

The theme of my paper – focusing on technology, since it is a technology conference – is that you need to analyze each activity separately since each aspect presents its own challenges and solutions. I will look forward to getting feedback from conference participants and would plan on posting the paper here on SLAW after the conference (assuming there are no restrictions on me so doing – I don’t think there are any restrictions).