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Archive for the ‘Lawyering’ Category

With a little help from my friends

Posted in Collaboration, Culture, KM, Lawyering, Technology on 20 October 2008 | 3 Comments »

Knowledge management activities in UK law firms depend very heavily on people power — being more reliant on Professional Support Lawyers (PSLs) than their US and continental European counterparts. Despite this, the recent Knowledge Management in Law Firms conference had a noticeable technology focus. I’m afraid I set the tone in the first session with [...]

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Social software in law firms

Posted in Information, Lawyering, Sharing, Web2.0 on 6 October 2008 | No Comments »

About ten days ago, I attended a law firm breakfast meeting hosted by Headshift, the social software consultancy. Penny Edwards has blogged about the event and posted the presentation on Slideshare. It was a really interesting meeting and discussion, and well worth the very early start I had to make to get there from Manchester.
The presentation [...]

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Prescriptivity and appropriateness

Posted in Knowledge, Language, Lawyering, Learning, Rationality, Tradition on 30 September 2008 | 2 Comments »

One of the links in my blogroll is to Language Log, which is home to some of the most rigorous blogging on the internet. As its name indicates, it deals with language and linguistics, but in the broadest possible sense. So its authors have taken on sex differences and biological determinism, science journalism, lolcats, and [...]

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The new Glossators

Posted in KM, Lawyering, Tradition on 30 July 2008 | No Comments »

Today I stumbled across Paul Maharg’s account of last April’s KM Legal conference (Day 1 | Day 2). I was glad I did: having helped the conference organiser to design the programme, I was very cross that I couldn’t get to it because of clashing commitments. In particular, I had wanted to see Paul again [...]

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Getting better through practice

Posted in Clients, Lawyering, Learning on 8 May 2008 | 1 Comment »

Law firms, perhaps professional service firms in general, attribute significance to experience. As David Maister puts it, “clients can look for experience, expertise or efficiency.” Real expertise (as in “this is the person who defines this area of practice”) is hard to come by; few firms can expect to have an excess of experts. Efficiency [...]

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How we see it

Posted in Culture, KM, Knowledge, Lawyering, Web2.0 on 5 May 2008 | No Comments »

Charles Arthur comments on the journalism vs new media debate, and in doing so explains his one rule for writing a blog post.
The rule is this: when I write the post, I know more about that particular topic than the average person who’s going to read it. But I don’t know more about the particular topic [...]

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Perspectives on different traditions

Posted in Lawyering, Tradition on 28 April 2008 | No Comments »

Reading Legal Week this morning, I was impressed by an article drawing on reports from a journalist embedded with the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team. Ben Hallman, who is a reporter with The American Lawyer, spent ten days looking at how Iraq’s civil justice system is being restored.
In the middle of his account, one sentence leapt [...]

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Ceci n’est pas un pipe

Posted in Culture, Design, KM, Knowledge, Lawyering on 17 April 2008 | 4 Comments »

A story in the New York Times about Nokia’s work on human behaviour illustrates beautifully how things we create often end up being used for very different purposes.
Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, [...]

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Tenses and legal dominance

Posted in Knowledge, Law, Lawyering on 3 April 2008 | No Comments »

In an Easter-flavoured post on Language Log, Geoff Pullum summarised the argument that the English language has no future tense.
The claim I’m making is not that reference to future time cannot be made in English; of course it can. And the claim is not that will cannot be thus used: probably over 80 percent of its occurrences [...]

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Document management and collaboration

Posted in Collaboration, Culture, Knowledge, Lawyering, Projects, Technology on 28 February 2008 | 1 Comment »

James Dellow has neatly summarised a discussion about the relative merits of wikis and document management in law firms. Reading both reminded me that I owe an former co-conspirator my view on document management systems as a tool for collaboration. I hope what follows will suffice.Like most law firms, we have a document management system [...]

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