Getting Started With Legal Knowledge Management
How do you get started with Knowledge Management (KM) in the legal profession?
I get approached on a regular basis with this question by small law firms that want to have the advantages of the larger firms, by lawyers or librarians who want to become part of an existing KM team in a larger firm, or by individuals hired into firms to lead KM initiatives. There are programs specific to Knowledge Management that exist, but there is not a lot of introductory material specific to the legal industry.
I recently sat down with Garry Wise of Wise Law so he could ask me about starting with KM in smaller law firms. Garry is pretty intuitive about KM and knowledge sharing: he recorded our discussion so that others could benefit. He also summarized the key learnings last week over on Slaw Tips. Here’s our discussion:
I was looking around for other resources. Here are a few I found:
- Ted Tjaden’s list of Knowledge Management resources on his Legal Research and Writing site. I especially recommend Ted’s own papers listed about half-way down on the page, but he also has a great list of books and blogs to get people started.
- Stikeman Elliott’s Taking Advantage of Law Firm Knowledge Management for Law Departments program they put on in November 2012. The page includes a video and a guide, and the program counts toward 1.0 hour professionalism credit.
- At LawTech Camp 2012, Stephanie Barnes and I presented an introduction to Knowledge Management. Video is on YouTube, posted by Monica Goyal and the slides are here on Slideshare.net.
- LawPro magazine also published this “side bar” article with some of the basics that I put together back in 2008: Knowledge Management for Law Firms
What have I missed? Is anyone putting together a current compilation of sources? I feel there is work that could be done, though, to better summarize the basics and then flesh it out into something practical and useful.
Here are a couple of related questions:
- If you are already doing KM work, what would you recommend to others to get them started?
- If you are looking to learn about Knowledge Management, what sorts of resources would you find helpful?
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