Many knowledge management professionals say that KM is 80% process and 20% technology. Perhaps true but if honored, requires often unrealistic cultural changes. A new article about work at Morrison & Foerster illustrates how applying modern software creatively can achieve important KM goals.
IT @ Morrison & Foerster: Lessons Learned from Retail (free registration required) in Law Technology News (December 2005) describes how MoFo provides “relevant search results in a fast and easy way.” Three key insights drove the work at the firm:
1. Attorneys need context to use precedents
2. Attorneys use precedents to find experienced lawyers
3. Attorneys demand simple and relevant systems
To meet these needs, the firm wanted a system to “identify hidden and explicit contextual information from multiple sources and automatically make inferences..” MoFo selected a federated search system and supports drawing valuable inferences by collecting more detailed information about matters and by profiling documents automatically.
Oz has demonstrated this system to other large law firms and the consensus is that this is one of the most innovative approaches today. (I am not disinterested however because I helped Oz Benamram, the practice resources attorney at MoFo, write this article.)