I arrived at LegalTech yesterday afternoon, just in time for the two panel discussions I moderated in the Knowledge Management track.  Before we started I took a quick walk through the exhibit hall and the floor seemed busy, which was encouraging.

In the first session I participated in, “Maximizing your KM investments”, I was joined by Jim Tuvell, Director of Knowledge Services at Fox Rothschild, Meredith Williams, Director of KM at Baker Donelson and Lorey Hoffman, CIO at Akin Gump.  Meredith shared thoughts on how to properly position KM initiatives within a firm’s existing infrastructure, particularly within attorney’s daily workflow.  Jim continued the discussion with approaches to cultivating adoption.  Lorey’s discussion certainly raised some eyebrows in the audience, as he described how eliminating the firm’s KM staff and drastically reducing the number of systems within the firm has greatly improved the productivity, and profitability, of the firm’s attorneys.  While this certainly was a contrarian perspective, as Lorey warned us before he began, I think it caused the audience to think different approaches to solving the same fundamental issues.  We closed the session by considering whether Akin Gump actually eliminated their KM initiatives (and staff), or did they just redefine and re-label KM.  KM, by any other name, can still be KM...

In the last KM session of the day, “External Knowledge Management”, I was joined by Patrick DiDomenico, CKO of Gibbons P.C., David Hobbie, Litigation Knowledge Manager at Goodwin Procter (my alma mater), and Tom Baldwin, CKO at Reed Smith.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with Patrick, David and Tom in the past, and the session was a lively one with an occasional taunt between panelists. 

Knowledge Management has traditionally been about the internal information your law firm has and the ways that it is shared across the firm. In this session we discussed the alternative information that is available, how firms are capturing and sharing it, as well as best practices involved.  Patrick discussed how information overload can be managed with the correct filters and tools in place, and talked about his firm’s efforts to “reduce the noise” using both custom built and publically available tools on the web. David did a great job walking through how Twitter has become a part of the KM process and best practices. His information went beyond the typical high level conversation and provided the deep details such as hash tags, list, saving, and searching.  And last but not least, Tom showcased how the firm has embraced the idea of Enterprise 2.0 by encompassing both internal and external information from the firm via the firm’s ouRSpace intranet portal.

If you are interested in more information on the session the deck is available online on Google Docs, and includes a list of resources and tools discussed during the session.

I’m also looking forward to ILTA’s SharePoint Symposium on Wednesday.  We’re co-sponsoring the event and I’ll be presenting on the evolution of SharePoint, looking at current best practices as well as what to expect with SharePoint 2010.