LawTech
Technology and legal practice
Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Lawyers and KM

Joy London at Excited Utterances asks an intriguing question: "Why don’t lawyers share their knowledge?"

The answer is not simple.  There are two contradictory impulses at work.  Lawyers do indeed share knowledge - sometimes.   The desire to display and share knowledge that one has learned with others is innate to the rational component of the human mind.  The natural impulse when a new treasure is found is to shout out, "Hey, guys, look at this!"

But another drive works in the other direction: Lawyers have been trained and have learned through experience to hoard information.  The lawyer's learned response is to keep confidences and secrets, for the benefit of the client and (not incidentally) the lawyer herself, and protected against the world at large.  And lawyers are natural competitors.  Even within a single law firm, many lawyers have a tendency to keep their knowledge to themselves, hoping to give themselves an advantage over their partners and associates. 

And those who allow their lawyer's minds to give way to the human instinct to share sometimes have a hard time making their associates understand their motivation.  For all of us who have created and maintained web sites, using weblogs or otherwise, how many times have we had to deal with the uncomprehending question, "Why are you taking the time to do all this?"   The true answer:  "It just feels right." 


10:02:52 PM    

Thoughts on Radio and KM

We noted recently that modifying Radio (or any logging tool) from its native one-way communication to true dialogue or multi-user communication would require some arcane knowledge of the tools and some work -- finagling with referrer logs and the news aggregator.  Since then, we came across Dave Winer's page entitled "The Two Way Web", where he begins to address some of these issues, but after talking about the need to create browser-based writing tools, it seems that he gets lost in some of his own related thoughts and never really finds a path out of the woods.  His page was last updated in March 2001, so it hasn't been a focus of his attention for a while.

Today Ernie the Attorney talks about the use of Radio as an information sharing tool, which is another way of talking about using it for two-way or multi-user communication.  (If one is just interested in one-to-many or broadcast communication, all one needs is the home page.)  But he chooses to focus on the page rankings, which does no more than tell us how many people are reading which pages.  The fact that the number one page is safersex.org probably tells us a lot.  The page rankings do little to tell us which pages provide substantive information -- the stuff we actually want to spend time to find and read -- just as high school popularity contests don't do much to predict who is worth talking to or who will actually go on to make a real contribution to society.  I'm interested in the smart people, not those who are prettiest,  and it is only by becoming familar with the personalities and their work that I will be able to make that discrimination.  At the same time, I do recognize that the number of hits does help to identify those who are interesting and those who have attracted the attention of others -- for whatever reason.

Any useful KM tool, for public or private use, must meet some pretty exacting criteria.  Those that I identified earlier are among them, and others will certainly have their own to add to the index.  I don't know that I would place the raw number of hits very high on the list. 


5:26:44 PM    






© 2002 Franco Castalone
Last Update: 9/4/2002; 7:07:37 AM

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