Beyond knowledge management to better management
Yesterday we visited the matriarch of our family to celebrate a special occasion -- her 100th birthday. She showed us the many humorous and touching birthday cards she had received (including one from the President and Mrs. Obama). Since she's as sharp as a tack, we were able to have a wide-ranging conversation that covered... Continue Reading →
Q: Why won't sharks attack lawyers? A: Professional courtesy. Even if you haven't heard that old chestnut before, I'm sure you've heard at least one of the thousands of equally lame lawyer jokes that people all over the world love to repeat. It's bad enough when a lawyer encounters one of these jokes in a... Continue Reading →
Some folks aspire to be as beautiful as a model, while other folks aspire to have a model on their arm. Lawyers, by contrast, aspire to have a collection of models. Model DOCUMENTS, that is. And, as long as lawyers want model documents, law firm knowledge management personnel are going to try to find ways... Continue Reading →
What's one thing that will doom your law firm knowledge management program? Your knowledge manager's inability to question premises. (To be honest, this can be a problem with most disciplines, but I don't presume to speak to any other areas of expertise.) For example, lawyers (being people who value precedent) have historically placed a high... Continue Reading →
An eminent Mary (Mary Meeker that is, not Mary Abraham!) has just presented her views on Internet Trends 2009 at the Web 2.0 Summit. Her key trend for 2009 was "Mobile Internet - Is and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think." She goes on to list 8 key mobile internet themes, but here's the one... Continue Reading →
Yesterday's post, Just Tell Me What Works, discussed some of the weaknesses arising from a blind obsession with best practices. The chief weakness is the false belief that someone else's solution will work perfectly for you. But what if you avoid that weakness and actually do the hard work of thinking for yourself in order... Continue Reading →
Sometimes we just want to be told what to do. To be honest, we all have days when that seems far preferable to thinking for ourselves. Unfortunately, it's exactly this temptation that has led us to make a fetish of "best practices" in knowledge management. However, we would do ourselves a great favor if we... Continue Reading →
Are you ready for your firm to flip the transparency switch? For many law firms, their Achilles' Heel is e-mail. Almost all correspondence is handled electronically, but lawyers around the world have not always been diligent in sending copies of this correspondence to their firm's records management system. To be fair, most firms I know... Continue Reading →
So now that you've moved past the early infatuation stage, is LinkedIn working for you? I'll freely admit that I'm thrilled that LinkedIn provides a way for others to update my rolodex. But past that, I'm not entirely sure where the value lies for a person like me. It's a different situation for folks in... Continue Reading →
I'm about to do something foolish -- I'm going to allow a soundbite (regarding a discipline in which I have virtually no training) to inspire a blog post. Nonetheless, I'm persisting in my foolishness because today's announcement of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom included references to concepts that rang... Continue Reading →
Above and Beyond KM 