PLL Header
December 2011 PLL E-News
In This Issue
Recommedations on Consultant's Report
Four Imperitoives for 2012
Congratulations to New AALL Board Member Amy Eaton
Members in the News
Quick Links

 


 

  

Find PLL on LinkedIn 
Follow PLL on Twitter

 

 

 

 

Join Our Mailing List
::

PLL Webinar 

 

Libraries & Knowledge Management: Taming the KM Monster

 

 

 
 

 

February 16, 2012

 9:00am EST/10:00am CST/12:00 pm PST

 

Speakers:

Camille Reynolds, MLS Director of Knowledge Management,

Nossaman LLP &

Jaye Lapachet, MLIS, Manager of Library Services,

Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLP

 

Learning outcomes:

 

 1: Participants will learn how librarian expertise can be applied to KM

projects within Law Firms & other organizations

 

 2: Participants will learn how to scale KM projects and utilize existing

tools to add value to their organizations via KM projects

 

Level:

Intermediate to Advanced

 

Audience:

For any librarian or information specialist interested in knowledge

management and adding value to their organization.

 

Learn how librarians are using their expertise to develop connections

within their organizations that deliver value by meeting the needs of

internal and external customers. Discover how you can implement KM

initiatives in your organization using existing tools and creative

problem solving. Internal knowledge sharing, information silos and

developing products that integrate internal and external data which

vendors can't duplicate create added value for attorneys, managers,

directors, and other professionals. The first talk provides tips on how

to start small, market your successes, and build on those successes for

larger-scale initiatives, discusses how to define KM in a way that fits

your organizational culture and mission, which, in turn, sets realistic

expectations of what KM can and cannot achieve.

Greetings!

PLL wishes you and yours a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year.

Your Feedback is Needed on Recommendations made by the Velvet Chainsaw Consulting Report About How the AALL Annual Meeting Should be Changed

 
 The AALL Executive Board committee charged with reviewing the report on the AALL Annual Meeting continues to seek comment from members. The report, Observations and Recommendations, American Association of Law Libraries, offers recommendations for improvement to the Annual Meeting.  We invite members to participate by reading the report and offering comments and suggestions to any of the committee members or by joining our community page on AALLNET. The deadline for comment is January 18. 
 
Please note there are recommdedations that may potentially limit the ability of Special Interest Sections to offer the same educational programs at conference. We ask that you read the report, send comments to the committee and join the new Annual Meeting Special Committee community to hear what others think.
Four Imperatives For 2012: The Legal Information Professional's Perspective
(Reprinted from Jean O'Grady's Dewey B. Strategic blog  available at http://deweybstrategic.blogspot.com/ with permission of the author)

 

In today's Strategic Legal Technology, my friend and former colleague Ron Friedmann posted an Open Letter to BigLaw Managing Partners: Four Imperatives for 2012 and Beyond
 

 

Here is my reinterpretation of Ron's recommendations for thriving the "new normal"  which includes both mandates and opportunities  for information professionals ...with some additional insights for Managing Partners.

1. Improve value by working more effectively.  Bring in your research experts - early and often.

Consider using librarians as research project managers to control cost and reduce time and manpower invested in complex research projects. While partners bewail the cost and the inefficiencies of associates research skills, most firms have not leveraged the research skills of the research staff as a strategic process management component of their AFA strategy .
 
As clients demand better value, lawyers need to become more efficient. Librarians and information professionals routinely deliver more value than they are credited for.
  
2. Diagnose and Improve your Business Operations

Any library Director who has not begun to plan for
streamlining and centralization of processes is dangerously behind the curve or "tone deaf" to the drumbeat of the market place. Do not wait to be asked to streamline - by then it may be too late. Law firm partners should also consider how the well honed  expertise  of research professionals, using highly specialized resources can analyse complex research problems and deliver analytical reports on a range of issues from companies or  industries to securities trading histories to dossiers on expert witnesses. These same projects which a librarian can deliver quickly,   could take days, if assigned to paralegals or project assistants that lack specialized skills and training.

Research and knowledge staff are also at the forefront of building intranet based "gadgets" and "self service" tools which allow anyone at the firm to quickly retrieve dockets, cases, patents, statutes, in one click without any specialized research training and without incurring client charges. All of these activities contribute to the streamlining of headcount which would have been required in more labor intensive approaches which prevail in the absence of specialized research expertise and guidance.


3. Engage Your Clients

This is my personal favorite on this list. "... to truly engage clients your lawyers need to know their business. Partners must read the news ...about their business and legal problems." Librarians have been out in front of this one too. Information professionals are investigating the next generation of monitoring services Linex, Attensa,
Manzama, Ozmosys "Open Alerts" which go well beyond looking for company names in news stories but can can aggregate, generate trending reports, word clouds and other graphical reports for heightening your expertise on a client's "pain points" and opportunities.

4. Adopt Metrics and Formal Governance Mechanisms

For me the "holy grail" of strategic information management would involve having firmwide metrics on information seeking activities undertaken by lawyers and staff in order to analyze opportunities for streamlining workflow and to optimize the matching of research activities with staff skill sets or identifying training or resource needs to improve productivity. 

Information professionals should continue to improve the collection and analysis of research staff activities by implementing research "help desk" applications which will not only improve workflow but also provide vital data on staff activities which can be used for developing benchmarks for processes and the measurement of the ever elusive "value" metric. The measurement of resource value can be tackled with the implementation of bar-coding of print resources to measure utilization by lawyers. Although Onelog, Research Monitor and
 Lookup Precision have offered many firms substantial benefits in measuring utilization of digital resources within the firm's network, these products will have to be upgraded to address the growing population of "un-tethered" resources, As lawyers migrate to portable libraries and ebooks on I-pads, tablets and smart phones, the current generation of monitoring tools may hit a wall but the need for utilization metrics will not.

"It Takes a Team"

Ron saved the best for last. He concluded his post with a recommendation that law firms drop use of the term "non-lawyer."  A phase so pervasive that frankly until this moment  I had not noticed the absurdity of defining about half of the average law firm population in terms of what they "are not." Other professional services organizations such as consulting firms are decades ahead of law firms in recognizing the importance of other professionals in building a cohesive client  support team. Since the practice of law is an information intensive profession which requires effective research and knowledge management skills, the "new normal" should create new opportunities for information professionals to have enhanced and important new roles on client teams and  in modeling innovative value enhancing strategies.
 
Congratulations to New AALL Board Member  Amy Eaton
 
Amy Eaton, Seattle Library Manager at Perkins Coie LLP has been elected to the AALL Executive Board.  Amy will take office at the 2012 Annual Meeting in Boston. 
 
Members in the News

 

PLL Authors
 
Kevin Miles' Spectrum article, "Library on a Credenza."  [PDF] - http://goo.gl/j1Q96.
 
Lucy Rieger's,  Spectrum article, "The NEW Normal Library Space :  Law firm libraries are becoming a compact and complex blend of print and online." [PDF 
http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/spectrum/Vol-16/No-3/new-normal.pdf