Law Firm KM Paradox

Link: Strategic Legal Technology :: Knowledge Management and Social Tagging and Bookmarking. This article "points to" technologies that may, or may not, be useful for law firm KM initiatives, but it does highlight the paradox that is law firm KM. Lawyers use (and create) knowledge on a daily basis yet many law firm KM databases are "knowledge landfills." They either contain "garbage" or not very much at all.

Why is that? Because there is something so conceptually formal about how KM is presented that it appears to be too much work to create useful "content." However, out of all the resources that we use on the Internet, some subset of that represents useful content--and it is content what we need not create but simply link to. Here the "content creation process" resembles something more akin to aggregating knowledge, perhaps adding our own "secret sauce" as opposed to re-inventing the proverbial wheel from scratch. Useful knowledge bases can be built this way in short order with just a little extra effort. It is a recognition that knowledge tends to grow organically from "miscellaneous pieces loosely joined."