A friend raises an interesting question for the Slaw community:

Imagine that you have a ten person lawyer firm (+ support staff) that needs to move to matter-centric DM. What choices would such a firm have, other than the conventional (and somewhat pricey) legal DM vendors (i.e. OpenText and Interwoven), whose work is good but doesn’t quite scale this small.

Does anyone know whether there is a matter-centric DM based on open source or web services, keeping in mind standard law firm security and confidentiality requirements. Does anyone have any novel ideas or suggestions? . . . [more]

Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson point out in the May 29th FIR Cut of their public relations and technology podcast For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report that the Canadian government has a contract with Open Text to develop social networking tools for its quarter of a million employees.

The May 27, 2008 news release on the Open Text website indicates this a renewal of their enterprise content management (ECM) system currently used by 58 federal government departments and agencies. What is new are the implementation of Web 2.0 capabilities:

The contract will also enable the Canadian Federal Government

Colleague Elizabeth Ellis blogged here last month on the advantage that SharePoint provides with distributed content: the idea that you can build a list of links to websites in a single source and then have SharePoint use that data to harvest the information, filter it by category (e.g., Litigation) and display it to the appropriate group within your organization.

I wholeheartedly agree with this, but having been several months behind Elizabeth on a similar project, the cynical part of me starts to ask (after just adding to my list the 650th URL): do users actually use lists of website links . . . [more]

Last week I was invited, wearing my hat of law librarian, to participate in a round table discussion on art, the Internet and intellectual property with the group ArtMob. ArtMob is a group of artists, scholars and other stakeholders interested in the intersection between Canadian culture and copyright and intellectual property law, and how it comes into play with the Web. . . . [more]

I am always leery of using SLAW to mention the services or product of a particular company, but I have been impressed with the earnestness at which XMLaw focuses on delivering practical solutions for law firms in delivering Intranet solutions to their users using the SharePoint platform (I am currently attending a conference they are sponsoring in Boston for their [primarily) law firm customers; my positive comments on their company have nothing to do with the boat tour of Boston Harbour and the open bar they just sponsored . . . .).

They seem to “get it” by their focus . . . [more]

All is well at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. I was a guest lecturer at the FIS 2133 Law Librarianship and Legal Literature course taught by colleague John Papadopoulos.

I was very impressed at the class’s willingness to discuss and debate issues surrounding knowledge management and the role that librarians can play, particular in a law firm environment.

We discussed such things as: (i) document management, information management, records management and knowledge management and whether and how they were different; (iii) the role – good and bad – that technology plays in knowledge-sharing and . . . [more]

What do you get when you cross Davos, Business Week, IBM and Global Workforce? An interesting article with implications for KM practitioners and researchers alike that doesn’t use the term ‘knowledge management’ once; but is teeming with KM ideas.

There was an interesting article in the January 17th issue of Business Week. It was buried in a Davos Special Report and more specifically in a series focused on Managing the Global Workforce. What caught my eye was an article on IBM (“International Isn’t Just IBM’s First Name“). In this article, without a singular explicit reference to Knowledge Management, . . . [more]

For all you law and IT lovers, I am pleased to announce that Leg@l.IT is back this year! With Canada’s Privacy Commissionner, Jennifer Stoddart, and Prof. Pierre Trudel as co-presidents, three tracks with the most interesting and en vogue subjects (here is the agenda) and an impressive group of speakers, including fellow Slawers (Simon Chester, Jordan Furlong and Vincent Gautrais) and blogger (David Bilinsky), it is THE event you don’t want to miss!

Leg@l.IT is an accessible and spearheading conference, the most important of this kind in Canada, about the potential and . . . [more]

For all of you who manage the firm intranet, or are charged with capture technologies for internal KM… do yourself a favour and check out this post on Google Blogoscoped.

A very interesting look at Google’s internal web functionality. Comes via a KM World webinar yesterday called Innovation@Google: A Day In The Life. An event I didn’t partake in, but really wished I had. :)

One of the screen captures below:

. . . [more]

KMWorld’s recent article “Content Management vs. Knowledge Management: A Summary of Key Differences” highlights the key differences between content management systems and knowledge management systems. As the article points out, understanding these differences is important when deciding which type of solution will best meet your organization’s need for producing, creating, capturing, distributing and evaluating knowledge. . . . [more]

I just saw an excellent demo by Recommind of two of their products: Decisiv Email and Axcelerate eDiscovery.

A huge challenge for every knowledge enterprise is capturing email on a centralized document management system. This is particularly so for “sent” email.

The Decisiv Email product uses Recommind’s “smart” technology to anticipate which folder to file an email in, whether the email arrives in your Outlook inbox or is being sent by you from Outlook. As you type the subject and content of an outgoing email, for example, the software predicts which client folder the email should be filed in. . . . [more]

CCH Canada was kind enough to let me write a column in their monthly e-newsletter for Canadian law students. I had not realized though that it was possible to get a free archive of these (and other CCH newsletters) online and to register to receive them. The articles (not mine!) are quite good and I assume (or hope) that students can benefit from the newsletters.

My column last month was entitled “Managing Legal Knowledge: KM Demystified.” Although most of my columns focused on legal research, I thought it important to introduce students to formal law-related KM since . . . [more]