1. 11th Annual Municipal Law Institute
July 20, 2011
Knowledge Management for Municipal
Attorneys
Alan J. Rothman
Knowledge Management Project Manager
Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton

2. 1. Objectives for Today’s Presentation:
• Define legal Knowledge Management (KM), its importance
and finding support for it
• Examine Legal KM from micro and macro perspectives for
municipal attorneys
• Evaluate how well legal KM scales from commercial law
offices to municipal law offices
• Practical takeaways
• Highlight key issues and pose policy and technical questions

3. 2. Defining the Terms of “Legal Knowledge
Management”
• Well, it depends … Legal KM can mean many different things to
many different people in a wide variety of law office settings.
• Through a range of collaborative processes, systems designs,
software and online tools, it is the [mostly] electronic means to
gather, organize, monitor, enhance and distribute for ready access
the always accumulating expertise within a law office.
• It further involves organized efforts to leverage the legal know how
continually generated by a group of lawyers.
• Legal KM departments can reside in a number of different places
within a legal organization and generally work with legal and non-
legal staff alike.
• Legal KM departments are distinguishable from a law firm’s IT
departments but the two must work closely together to design,
implement, maintain and upgrade legal KM systems.

4. 3. What Types of Commercial Law Firm KM Systems
Can be Distilled and Applied at a Municipal Law Office?
• Forms and precedent libraries
• Automated document assembly tools
• Document management and search capabilities
• Intranet, extranet and web site design and
content
• Wikis and blogs [with commenting and Q&A
features]
• Newsfeeds and news alerts
• Project management systems

5. 4. Does Legal KM Scale so that Municipal Law Offices Can
Apply These Principles, Processes and Technologies?
• When applied on the micro level to what gets done by the individual
attorney in the manner in which he or she can organize and access the
information, news, documents needed for meetings, calls, court
appearances and so on, there are numerous way in which legal KM can
assist.
• When applied on the macro level to what the entire municipal law office
is doing, in terms of making the support staff and attorneys more
efficient, economical, prepared and well informed, there are likewise
many time-tested KM systems that can help.
• During this difficult period in our economy and its effects upon the
resources of cities, legal KM is not the answer to every budgetary issue
in a law dept., but rather, a set of applicable and practical solutions that
can make a difference in a municipal law office’s operations.
• There have been efforts to quantify the costs and benefits of Legal KM,
but it remains difficult to quantify. Nonetheless, what value is achieved
when an attorney can more quickly access precedential documents that
have been properly identified, commented upon by his or her peers and
then made readily accessible?

6. 5. Some Lessons Learned from a Scalable Legal KM
Platform Such as Creating a Wiki
• Give everyone with a stake in the new system an opportunity to
participate in the design, policy, implementation and content
creation. This will make the buy-in across the office much easier.
• Developing and then persevering with a project plan is essential.
Stakeholders should meet regularly to discuss it and make revisions
when needed.
• Run a pilot program first to identify technical, procedural and policy
issues and then follow through on addressing them.
• Seek out potential users and beneficiaries of a proposed project and
ask them to act as “sponsors” who will assist in promoting interest
and acceptance by their colleagues.
• Seek out colleagues in other law offices that may already have
experience in the proposed system and ask them to share their
experiences and insights.

7. 6.1. Is Legal KM More About Technology, Process
and/or Office Culture?
• Well, it depends, once again, on all three working in harmony across a law
office.
• Experience has shown that the bits and bytes are important, but
establishing and refining the processes supported by the technology, are
essential to making legal KM work. The newest, shiniest and fastest
hardware, software and web connections are great to have, but they will
not produce results without significant buy-in to the legal KM initiatives by
everyone associated with them.
• Technology continues to change at an ever-accelerated rate. Some
resulting issues include:
– How can a finite amount of IT Dept. resources be best allocated to legal KM
systems?
– Will other departments and operations benefit as well from these
investments?
– Who has the best awareness of legal KM systems and developments and can
assist?

8. 6.2. Is KM more about technology, process
and/or office culture?
• “Process” involves designing, testing, implementing and promoting
workflows and decision points. These are subject to ongoing
change. Moreover, those responsible for these processes should
have significant input into their design and refinement. As well,
diagrams and flowcharts can be quite helpful.
• Office culture can be the classic “top down” or “bottom up”
environments, as well as hybrids of the two. Considerations in any
of these environments include:
– Where do new ideas originate and how well does word of them travel?
– Is there sufficient resolve to see a proposal through to its logical
conclusion?
– Is there a willingness to consider a “disruptive” technology for the
office?
– Is there enough support to be willing to spend $1.00 when it might
later potentially save $2.00?

9. 7. What is the Nature of the Overlap and Dependence
Between Legal KM and Legal Project Management?
• Legal Project Management (LPM) is a term used for all aspects of the
implementation of a new system or process in a law office. It is most
commonly used in terms of e-discovery but can also include a law office’s
transactional practices and administrative operations.
• A project manager is assigned to oversee the execution of all of a project’s
technical, managerial and communications requirements.
• Project management software is deployed to plan out all of the
subprojects, tasks, milestones, key dates, percentages of completion and
personnel assigned to various responsibilities. There are both proprietary
and free web-based offerings available.
• Legal KM frequently requires some manner of LPM to take a new system
through all of its phases of design, building, testing, debugging, validation,
implementation, launch, maintenance and upgrading.
• The IT departments in all law offices must be highly involved in making
legal KM initiatives work.

10. 8. How to Promote Information Sharing and,
Conversely, to Resist Information Hoarding?
• Publicize success stories of lawyers in your office who
have assisted their colleagues in some new or novel way
with legal KM.
• Post helpful internal and external legal KM resources on
the office intranet with explanations of their application(s)
to everyday practice.
• Have someone do a brief demo of a worthwhile
information sharing tool or website at an office meeting,
lunch or CLE class.

11. 9. How Can Awareness, Support and Resources be
Gained for a Specific and Well-defined KM project?
• Develop a concise project proposal. Think of it as a
supporting memorandum.
• Set up and promote pilot projects and their results.
• Document all work flows and open them up for full
commentary.
• Look for other possible beneficiaries in the office who
might lend their support.

12. 10. What Role Does the Emergence of Social Media Play in
Developing KM in a Municipal Law Office Environment?
• Facebook and Google+
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Hardware that makes networking, among many other
things, easier for lawyers includes smart phones and
tablet computers

13. 11.1. Smaller Scale KM Activities for Individual
or Small Groups of Attorneys
• Find software tools and web sites that are dedicated to
helping you organize your information. Sometime this can be
as simple as organizing your email into a series of folders.
Efficient electronic filing skills are valuable.
• Delete what you will not be using from email, files, office and
social networking sites.
• Search out free legal specific research and support services
online. Again, these are highly accessible from anywhere.
• No one can read everything. Use the information capabilities
of newsfeeds and Google alerts and set these use in useful
categories. Smart phones can be used to subscribe. There
are also free services to assist in filtering and organizing
tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates and so on.

14. 11.2. Smaller Scale KM Activities for Individual
or Small Groups of Attorneys
• Seek out colleagues inside and outside of your department
who might be interested in discussing and promoting a new
KM project. Perhaps there is someone who will emerge to
take on a leadership role.
• Volunteer to test out a new system. Your input is valuable and
makes you more of a KM-friendly lawyer.

15. 12. Trends in Legal KM That Can Benefit
Municipal Attorneys
• More ubiquitous computing in “the cloud” and why this is so
important.
• Plenty of legal specific and KM resources are online, including
legal research.
• Law offices are looking more towards Legal KM for potential
increases in efficiency in the face of budget constraints.
• More lawyers are out there in practice with the tech skills and
motivation to lead or assist in KM projects and achieve new
efficiencies in getting their work done.

16. 13. Conclusions
• Legal KM will likely scale well in municipal law office
operations.
• Legal KM projects can be small, medium and large as
well as formal and informal.
• Robust technology is there to help, but legal KM’s
success is equally a matter of process and office culture.

17. 14. Selected KM References
• Legal KM Blogs:
– Above and Beyond KM at http://aboveandbeyondkm.com/
– 3 Geeks and a Law Blog at http://www.geeklawblog.com/
– Strategic Legal Technology at http://www.prismlegal.com/wordpress/
• Related Reading:
– Legal Project Management: Control Costs, Meet Schedules, Manage
Risks, and Maintain Sanity, by Steven B. Levy, CreateSpace (December
2009)
– The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, by Fredrick P.
Brooks, Addison-Wesley Professional (April 2010)
– The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, by
Richard Susskind, Oxford University Press, USA; Revised edition
(September 2010)