I have been remiss in not reporting sooner recent legal technology articles on knowledge management, blogging, and business intelligence.
KM. Law firms reinvent KM in KMWorld provides an excellent account of KM at one-half dozen large law firms (as reported by, among other bloggers, Excited Utterances).
Blogging. The current issue of Law Practice magazine is largely devoted to blogging, carrying several useful articles. Alan Rothman, relatively new to the blogosphere, posts about this article and asks some interesting questions about the future of legal blogging, including whether blogs will “become certified continuing legal education provider-channels and/or will existing CLE providers adapt blogging tools to reformat and distribute their courseware” and could “a specialized search engine dedicated to the legal blogosphere alone potentially develop into a legitimate legal research tool?”. I previously touched on the second question in my “Disintermediation Redux” post.
On the topic of blogging, I also found Washingtonpost.com Launches RSS Advertising of interest in the development of blogging. Anyone who reads my blog from its home at Prismlegal.com will see ads associated with the blog fed by the ALM network. Anyone reading my blog via an aggregator will not. Embedding advertising in blog feeds via RSS (really simple syndication) is an emerging trend.
Business Intelligence. Bryan Cave CIO John Alber has written a fascinating article on his firm’s development and use of business intelligence software. He explains that it’s not enough to have a time and billing system or typical financial reporting. Developing actionable information for partners to make the right business decision requires a lot of data massaging and presenting the results meaningfully. Using examples from his firm, John illustrates the power of good BI.