It's Time To Get Serious about Sharing - FreePint for Legal Information Professionals
Jinfo Blog

By James Mullan

Abstract

Law firms have long been regarded as being at the forefront of knowledge sharing and collaborative projects. Whilst this might be true, a significant barrier to the adoption and incorporation of these types of projects is the culture that exists within law firms. Change management can be a significant challenge for information professionals working within law firms. However, there are significant opportunities for legal information professionals and some of the latest articles published by FreePint demonstrate this.

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The importance of knowledge management and knowledge sharing is often tempered by whether staff even use the tool - and if they're interested in the tool, the best way for them to engage with it.

Whilst there are many useful articles available, the following are recent resources that will be of interest to knowledge and information professionals working within law firms.

Articles

• Key Legal KM Tools from 2000 to Present Day
• How to Increase User Engagement with Knowledge Tools
• The Benefits of Knowledge Management
• How to Avoid Collaboration Fatigue       
  

Getting Serious about Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing

A key theme that has developed over the last few months is the need for law firms and other organisations to develop effective knowledge management strategies.

Several of the articles published recently by FreePint have highlighted this and include Key Legal KM Tools from 2000 to Present Day. In this article I looked back at some of the resources I and other information managers within law firms have used over the past 14 years. These include early versions of intranets, web portals and the development of Web 2.0 and subsequently social media tools behind the firewall.

Encouraging Adoption

Whilst it's great to have a suite of tools available within law firms for lawyers and business support staff, a significant issue is engagement and adoption.

In How to Increase User Engagement with Knowledge Tools, I look at how often knowledge and information professionals are tasked with encouraging and developing this user engagement. This can be a time-consuming and difficult task given the complexity of some of the tools now available within law firms. However, this is an important task and one that I believe knowledge and information professionals are ideally placed to take forward.

Setting Out a Strategy

If you have been tasked with taking forward your organisation's engagement with knowledge tools, or encouraging knowledge sharing, then the FreePint article The Benefits of Knowledge Management will be useful in demonstrating to peers and senior management within your organisation how important it is to develop a strategy and to think about the effective use of technology.  

Another article on this topic which is also well worth reading is How to Avoid Collaboration Fatigue, anyone who is involved with knowledge management or social tools will be able to relate to this article.

Order your FreePint Subscription and gain access to the full archive of FreePint Articles and Reports, plus have the ability to share these resources with anyone else at your organisation.

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