By John Hokkanen LAW FIRM technology has moved beyond its back-office origins, squarely into personal productivity and thinking tools. The Internet has taken technology beyond one's own office, and made it the mechanism of information sharing and publication to an organization's long-term partners and clients. On the surface, because these new goals involve technology, the change may be viewed as a technology issue. But it isn't. Legal knowledge management is about people and processes, not technology.
Technology simply becomes the grease to connect people and quicken processes.
Knowledge management is about understanding what lawyers do, how they work, and the kind of information they need to do their jobs. An ability to use technology helps, and certainly one needs to be able to talk intelligently to programmers and tech types. But this is more about understanding the knowledge domain of the lawyer's world and being able to define what needs to be done, not how to do it. Unprepared Most IT departments are unprepared to deal with the knowledge needs of the next millennium. Often, they want to focus on their domain expertise, which is how to set up a server, what networking protocol will work, or how to administer a database.