I attended a LexisNexis webinar presented by Gibbons' CKO Patrick DiDomenico on Wednesday and I thought Patrick did a great job describing the evolution of document management and work product retrieval systems. I did not see part 1 of the "KM 101" series yet, but plan to. 

 

On the work product retrieval topic, Patrick discussed his firm's use of LexisNexis TotalSearch product and was later joined by Kathleen Hogan of Cassells Brock, who talked about her firm's use of Interwoven Universal Search.

 

XMLAW has worked with other work product retrieval systems such as West km from Thomson West and RealPractice from Practice Technologies and has integrated these products into OneView Search leveraging Microsoft search technology.  In addition to the applications discussed in the webinar, both of these applications should also be on the short list for firms evalulating such technologies.  Combining the advanced classification and entity extraction features of a good work product retrieval system with the power of an effective enterprise search can deliver impressive results.  More on this in a future post...

 

The session also reminded me that there are still many law firms that aren't familiar with knowledge management and that now is a good time to get back to basics.  Given today's technology and deeper understanding of KM, I believe there are more practical, achievable (and affordable) approaches to effective knowledge management then in the past.