Beyond knowledge management to better management
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 →
What do lawyers and prisoners have in common? They share a fixation on time. Both groups are expected to spend a certain amount of time -- whether it be expressed as target billable hours or as sentencing guidelines. However, there is a noteworthy distinction between the groups: prisoners get time off for good behavior. While... Continue Reading →
If you've read Alternative Billing Alternatives and Update on Alternative Billing, you now know that the panelists on ILTA's Using Technology to Manage Costs, Increase Profitability and Support Billable Hour Alternatives session believe that bare discounts are going to have a negative effect on a law firm's profitability unless that firm significantly trims its costs... Continue Reading →
Writing Alternative Billing Alternatives gave me an excuse to contact my friend, Jeff Rovner, for some background detail on the superb session he, Jeffrey Brandt,Thomas Gaines, and Eugene Stein presented at ILTA09. In our e-mail exchange today, he provided the following additional insights: In his original example, he proposed a 10% discount in rates for... Continue Reading →
Above and Beyond KM 