The document discusses how law firms can better capitalize on their unique information and knowledge to improve business performance. It argues that investments in information systems are not delivering their full potential due to underlying issues with how the firm's information and metadata is structured and labeled. To fully leverage information as a strategic asset, the document recommends that firms develop a centralized taxonomy and consistent labeling of people, content, clients and matters to facilitate better information retrieval, automated delivery of relevant information to lawyers, and aggregation of data for business insights.

1. posted 2 Jul 2009 in Volume 3 Issue 5
http://www.kmlegalmag.com
Joining It All Up
Exploiting information and knowledge at the centre of our firms to improve
business performance
Capitalising on your firmʼs unique information and knowledge is one of the
remaining untapped opportunities left for businesses to remain competitive in this
climate. Understanding how your knowledge can be used as a critical asset to
improve business performance relies on confidence in the underlying data and
may require a new information culture at the firm1. The firm that kicks off with this
focus on information really can deliver the long-term benefits in search,
automated personalisation and more powerful business intelligence.
There is always a broad range of demands made of our firm's information and
knowledge investments, but at a basic level the business has these three needs
in common.
Information Retrieval: making the information and knowledge captured and
codified in our systems findable (and re-findable).
Fundamentally, there seems little point spending a lot of time producing the very
best client document, piece of knowhow or research for a pitch presentation if it
ends up only ever being used just the once or read by just one other person. The
real value of the knowledge captured must be that it can be found and re-used
again; that it can continue to add value to the firm and its clients long after it has
been produced.
Automated Push: being presented with the information we need at exactly the
time we need it.
Whereas search technologies to date have primarily focused on the ʻpull
mechanismʼ that enable lawyers to go out and find the information in the context
of an explicit need, the ʻpush mechanismʼ enables the information and knowledge
to be presented to the lawyer in the context of their work. This might be in the
form of personalising each lawyerʼs intranet homepage so that the knowhow,
current awareness, industry and firm news is displayed in the context of the
matter they are working on, or by delivering relevant and related knowhow within
the specific document they are drafting.
1
The 2008 Cap Gemini publication: ʻThe Information Opportunity Reportʼ may be a useful
resource for firms wanting to find out more and is freely available (requires registration) from:
http://www.harnessinginformation.com/

2. Aggregation: bringing information and data together in a structured way that
moves beyond the traditional financial reporting to see new trends and
opportunities.
We need to be able to slice-and-dice a lot more of our data and information from
across more of our systems to see the possibilities for new markets and the
provision of new legal services. From its very simplest we need to know how
many clients we have worked for in a particular jurisdiction and sector for a pitch
or legal directory listing. But increasingly we need to bring similar matter types
together to build more strategic and client-focused packages of legal solutions.
We need to start seeing the similarities between what we think are lots of
bespoke and customised types of work being done across the firm and turn them
into discrete billable components that can be handled by the right people to
deliver more efficient fee structures and higher quality work for the client.
These three drivers are behind some of the most expensive investments our
firms are making in information solutions: enterprise search, business
intelligence, content management systems and new ways of presenting that
information, on new platforms, with the latest new tools and within intranets and
portals.
So why is there a feeling that some of these investments arenʼt quite delivering
on their promises? Or that things are certainly better than they were, but at the
same time not quite as good as we think they could be? Or that other firms seem
to have had more success with their systems?
The problems weʼre having now are fundamentally with the information and the
way we describe that information (the metadata); not necessarily just with the
systems or technology weʼve recently purchased. Tools, by themselves, deliver
little real value.
The underlying firmwide schema or centralised vocabulary of terms used to label
and describe your most valuable asset – the firmʼs collective knowledge –
requires some closer attention.
Good search and browse experiences for information and knowledge retrieval
demands reliable (and light-weight) taxonomies in the form of facets and filters.
Your information needs to be tagged with these useful labels to help describe,
find and contextualise a piece of content and connect it with related documents
for a more successful search journey.
Personalising and automating the delivery of content requires your systems to
understand who you are and what you are interested in and then connect that
understanding with your information and knowledge documents. This is best
done using a mixture of the agreed terms that are used by all your systems,

3. along with some of the more social networking and creativity tools that can
bubble up the most relevant content based on the hidden connections between
people and their information and knowledge.
Connecting similar and related data and information to look for different and
previously unseen relationships and patterns within your content requires the use
of standard, re-usable and accurate labels.
The following steps outline the broad scope for creating that centralised schema
of terms and labels within the firm (usually as part of a strategic information or
knowledge architecture initiative).
1. Quality & Value.
Not every email and document needs to be sharable or re-findable.
Understand where to focus the information improvement efforts to ensure that
the most business-critical content is retrieved, automatically pushed to the
right people, and aggregated for profitable horizon scanning.
2. Structure.
Look at the full lifecycle of documents, clients and matters to make sure only
the most essential of metadata is being captured and that there is a clear and
beneficial business or staff need behind it (the three outlined above are a
good start).
Whilst the standard lists of ʻPractice Groupʼ, ʻLegal Subjectʼ, ʻDocument Typeʼ
(etc) are all very well to support knowledge findability, it is necessary to map
in more of the contextual business development, people-focused and financial
lists to create a true information architecture that will support the firmʼs wider
investments in information systems.
3. Labels (ie. metadata and taxonomies).
Focusing on the classifications that you use to describe your people, your
content and your firm:
a. Coverage – have you got the right coverage for your
classifications? A simple lack of mandatory fields when profiling
matters and documents can be the real obstacle for re-findability
and reliable reporting.
b. Consistency – are you using the same labels in your classification
of content across systems? By not being consistent in your labelling
or mapping effectively to hide the differences across multiple
information systems means you will always see a slightly
incomplete and unreliable picture of your firm and its information
and knowledge.

4. c. Accuracy – how accurate are the labels that you are using? Are
they up to date and still relevant to the firm and its practices? And
are they being accurately applied to the content itself? Keeping
information relevant, accurate and pivotal to your firm requires
ongoing governance and management by everyone involved.
Many of our firms have what look like technology problems, but that are really
about the underlying information. And since those information problems tend to
affect multiple systems across the business, itʼs worth taking a holistic approach
to address them. By fully exploiting your information through a strategic
knowledge architecture initiative that creates more effective information
findability, sharing and re-use you can deliver improvements that can benefit
where you are now as well as where you want to be.
Kate Simpson is a freelance consultant (http://www.tangledom.com/) aiming to create the most
compelling user experiences, improve employee productivity and communications and, with her
specialist focus on findability, helping organisations uncover and untangle their paths to
knowledge. Kate's industry expertise lies in helping legal and publishing organisations with their
tangled landscapes, from Lawtel and Centaur Media to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and
Simmons & Simmons.