Are Law Firms Ready for Transparency?
Attorney and KM expert V. Mary Abraham provides details on how one law firm has found a way to create real transparency in its dealings with clients via an extranet, and whether this process may start a trend.
Attorney and KM expert V. Mary Abraham provides details on how one law firm has found a way to create real transparency in its dealings with clients via an extranet, and whether this process may start a trend.
Conrad J. Jacoby focuses on the new requirement that litigants must meet early in a dispute to discuss the scope of discovery work to reach agreement on how best to proceed with the discovery of potentially relevant electronically stored information (“ESI”). What happens, though, when fundamental assumptions used to reach agreement at that early stage in the case turn out to be incorrect?
Gretta Rusanow outlines her recommendations on why this year presents an excellent opportunity to work on those long-desired collections of models, best practice documents, sample clauses and know how files.
Heather Colman explains how wikis were an ideal KM solution for her law firm. Quick and easy to set up, requiring little IT support, wikis support central data repositories and provide features including search capabilities, email, RSS, and also allow users to create a taxonomy of subject tags to classify information.
Following up on his commentary about how problem-solving models can help lawyers (and law students) to solve legal problems systematically and to communicate legal solutions persuasively in writing, Troy Simpson discusses what makes a good problem-solving model.
Jim Calloway explains why every lawyer needs to understand a few basic things about metadata. He contends that the legal ethics implications of metadata “mining” are no longer just of interest to the lawyers processing electronic discovery, or the ethics mavens.
Conrad J. Jacoby’s holiday wish is for the legal community to finally develop one or more judicially accepted standards that can be used to craft consistent ways of requesting and producing information. With baseline procedures in place, both producing and requesting parties, as well as judges, will be able to make more informed decisions about the need for discovery and the way in which such discovery should be conducted.
Conrad J. Jacoby addresses how critical technology issues related to document authenticity and document-associated metadata have left fewer lawyers willing to accept e-mail messages and other electronic documents in print format. He argues that litigants choosing to produce electronically stored information in hardcopy format should be prepared to provide more complete electronic copies of their production, even when it isn’t initially requested by opposing counsel.
In his third article in the series, Troy Simpson focuses on “a process model of problem-solving that provides a useful framework, because it offers a systematic, non-random way of tackling problems.”
In this second article in the series, Troy Simpson suggests that the ‘case method’ of teaching law may help to explain why lawyers write badly. He then outlines some of the advantages of the ‘problem method’ of teaching law.