One of the presenters is showing us a website his firm created. Originally it started as a knowledge management project in which they wrote a treatise and put it online on a subscription basis. This website includes links to and summaries of regulatory decisions, coupled with an excellent search function. In fact, the search engine is so good that lawyers working for the applicable regulator have stopped using their own system and now prefer to use this law firm’s subscription website instead.
The firm has recently moved the updating/maintenance of the site offshore. Lawyers in India now create the summaries of the regulartory decisions. The firm estimates that the cost of doing this offshore is about 20% of what they spent on comparable activities at home. While they had to do a fair amount of work in the beginning to ensure that the offshore lawyers produced high quality work, they are now very satisfied with the standard of work produced.
The firm considers this website to be a good means of generating revenue from a classic knowledge management activity.
Lessons Learned:
* They created the treatise in a very linear fashion. They have since abandonned this approach because they learned that their users prefer nuggets of information easily accessible by search.
* They installed Google mini to index the site and found this to be a stunning success.
* Search analytics show a huge variety in the search terms users employ. And, the most popular search queries are not what the law firm expected.
* The firm has used website analytics to understand better what their subscribers want and how they are using the site. They have then modified the site to meet subscriber needs.
Above and Beyond KM 