Actionable Information and the Law

We were treated to an in house session from Oz Benamram this week in the form of a demonstration plus Q&A on the KM work he has been leading over at Morrison and Foerster, AKA MoFo.

Oz, the Director of KM, has been a leading light in the Legal KM world (on this side of the ocean at least) based on the success of the monolithic approach he and his team have taken to the question of KM at a law firm or, more specifically, the search for "Actionable Information".

The end product: "Answerbase"; is a one-stop shop for everything you might wish to know about documents, people (internal and external) and matters plus a great deal more. The integration of various repositories as contextual variables and faceted search parameters uing web 2.0 techniques (XML Mashups etc) has been neatly done and done without the usual clutter that an overly rich data store usually produces.

You can see some simple elements of Answerbase in the demo linked above but I should warn you that version is now substantially behind the times based on what we saw this week. Included in the new product is the integration of further time and billing data, email contents and contact info from address books...somewhat astonishing stuff to have available for general access.

Some key elements to the strategy he has followed stood out for me:

1) Ask for forgiveness, not permission: curious about he negotiated a search of attorney's emails and contact data to enrich the Answerbase result set I asked him how it was done.

He explained that the approach was simply to get top level support, do very careful due diligence with respect to conflicts and confidentiality and then simply move ahead and show the finished result before asking for general permission. This way it was left for those objecting to find reasons not to do it when the obvious value was so high...so far this approach seems to have worked very well at MoFo.

In the example we saw, the mining of contact data had led to the development of both internal and external people searching, something I have not seen so nicely integrated anywhere else.

2) Confidentiality vs Access: at a law firm, matters are reviewed by the conflicts and ethics committee before they are even accepted. If there is a conflict and it can be managed, the appropriate conflict walls (AKA Chinese Walls) are built into the applications that will handle the matter and all the attorneys are notified and from there on it is business as usual.

It is worth noting that the majority of a big Firm's matters are not in conflict and most all work product is available TO ALL PRACTICES. This is very different to our own situation where access is kept highly restricted until seniority levels are sufficient.

Also notable here is the (not entirely explicit) fact that the entire work product of the Firm, some millions of documents, are located in the DMS and these are the work product being searched by Answerbase.

3) Partnership: Oz has partnered with a vendor in a highly synergistic and beneficial relationship that has propelled MoFo and the Vendor right to the forefront of the Legal KM / Product offering world in a way that no one else has in the legal world been able to emulate. He made the comment that early on an interview with the CIO of Bain had revealed that while they had a truly outstanding home grown system, they were in two minds as to whether the cost of the investment was really worth it given how much work went into it for just one customer.

Between legal services (many many Firms competing) and business consulting (a much smaller pool) there are probably a handful of parameters that make this equation shift, depending on your business perspective but in the case of MoFo the benefit of not having invested in the actual development seems clear. Oz has a team of three, none of whom are developers and they have delivered a world class product to the Firm that provides a compelling business advantage.

It will be very interesting to revisit Answerbase in another six months and see what new elements have been integrated.