I gained lots of insight from Day 1 at the LawTech Canada conference earlier this week.

Deloitte, one of the sponsors, had two good sessions on enterprise content management and on preventing information leakage. On the topic of enterprise content management, I realized that my paper on “The 7 Faces of Legal Knowledge Management” (here in PDF) was, in part, discussing enterprise content management without using that phrase (to the extent that most knowledge managers in the legal environment manage a wide variety of information across the organization).

There are, however, I think 2 main reasons knowledge managers . . . [more]

While I bounced back and forth between Toronto and New York this week, a lot of other things were bouncing around in the world of biotech:

The U.S. stimulus funding to promote adoption of electronic medical records bounced across the border to Ontario, where a new program was implemented through the Ontario Medical Association. The Ontario program provides an amount of cash per physician comparable to the U.S. funding, plus it offers consulting help and provides funding for upgrades.

Novartis bounced $1 billion of its R&D efforts to China, and in the same breath called India’s upcoming decision on a . . . [more]

The Library Journal reported:

A Harvard University Task Force on University Libraries has released a report [PDF] aimed at building a 21st-century library, knitting together the university’s robust and disparate library units, collaborating with peer libraries, and emphasizing access to materials rather than acquisition.

It is budget planning season at my firm. I like to offer our firm management creative solutions for keeping costs low while offering exceptional services and maintaining a collection so lawyers a Field Law have resources at hand to find the best solutions four our client. In the decade that I have shared . . . [more]

Word came down recently that the University of Montreal’s Centre de recherche en droit public won a six million dollar grant “to create a research infrastructure in which to develop different software solutions to the many problems currently plaguing the justice system.” You can read the CRDP announcement here. The Cyberjustice Laboratory project will comprise a research facility, a “virtual courtroom” and a “transportable courtroom” housed at McGill University. The project is headed by Professor Karim Benyekhlef, Director of the CRDP, and by Nicolas Vermeys, Associate Director of the project.

The chart below will give you some idea of . . . [more]

Today and tomorrow, Toronto Innovation Showcase is bringing together City of Toronto staff, City leaders, and various groups of citizens to discuss the Open Government movement and what it should mean to the City. The question being asked is:

“How can we strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative?”

Part of the Showcase will be the Open Data Lab, taking place this afternoon 1:00 – 4:15 p.m. ET. This will be a unique opportunity for citizens to engage with City government. Today’s Open Data Lab will be led by consultant . . . [more]

I attended a great workshop on Wednesday looking at KM from novel perspectives, part of the ARK Group Knowledge Management for the Legal Profession 2009 Conference.

Workshop theme and goals:
For KM to continue to grow in law firms, we need to move beyond “traditional” projects and technology initiatives.
This full-day workshop will dive into those areas that lie at the innovative edge of KM. Our goal for the day is simple. We want each attendee to leave this workshop with tools they can apply to the expansion and improvement of KM’s reach within their respective firms.

I believe the . . . [more]

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 / . . . [more]

This week in the world of biotech, things were opening up:

• GSK, the UK Government and The Wellcome Trust are opening a new science park, pitching “jobs, jobs, jobs” to constituents, and pitching “open innovation” to potential tenants. But “open innovation” probably doesn’t mean the same thing in biotech as it does in the rest of the world, so don’t hold your breath waiting to see a Creative Commons logo on your Tylenol bottle.
• mdBriefcase, which provides online education to physicians, is opening up a Canadian consumer health website called MedSchoolForYou.com, but it has some way to go

Email lists still exist.

One of the first — if not the first — social media on the internet, they’re still enjoyed by people who like to find their information in their inbox. Though perhaps their number is not what it was when Eric J. Heels compiled his 1996 catalog of Law-related Resources on the Internet.

The International Law Librarians List is of interest because, unlike many, it has a publicly accessible and searchable web archive, which makes it a potentially valuable research tool, of course, and also a source of interesting information if you’re just browsing.

For . . . [more]

I’ve learned from Hughes-Jehan Vibert that his JurisPedia project has recently won the 2009 Dieter Meurer Prize for Legal Informatics [in German]. We talked about JurisPedia a couple of years ago here on Slaw. And last year Simon Chester posted about the 2008 winner, Case Matrix.

JurisPedia’s new front page operates as a search engine, using Google’s Custom Search, with filters available that let you focus your search on any one of 70 jurisdictions around the world. You can, as well, search the wiki that is the growing JurisPedia encyclopedia.

Hughes-Jehan, who studied at UQAM and is now a . . . [more]

Thanks to a tweet by Stephane Cottin (@cottinstef), I’ve found a catalogue of resources on legal informatics — “legal information systems. . . a research area within the disciplines of information science and computer science.” Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources by Robert Richards contains a hoard of links and references to material that is mostly beyond my ability to understand. But for those of you trained in information science, this should be a useful resource.

Despite my relative ignorance, I’ve found that some of what Richards offers is stimulating and informative even for me. For example, . . . [more]

I have been wearing my knowledge management hat a lot lately. I am working with our internal departments and groups to identify process pain points and find ways to tweak our existing systems to enable more intuitive information sharing. This process make me think about … processes.

Like many organizations, we sometimes fall down on laying out our processes for things. This often means that one group thinks another group is responsible for a task that they are really responsible for. Beyond obvious internal communication issues, I interpret my KM roll as “facilitator of good processes”.

I went looking for . . . [more]