Margaret Grottenthaler: Yes. The Content Management System (CMS) has to be integrated with the KM initiatives, particularly the taxonomy. Information is being published to our portal by category and we want to enhance that by allowing further personalization by deeper categories. Information or knowledge products can live in different parts of the portal and we need the CMS to facilitate publication.

The categorization aspect, which is essential to efficiencies in publication, is clearly a KM function. While we have a homegrown CMS that is servicable, we find that we now need something much more sophisticated to make the personalization and the pushing out of information work better.

Mark Zoeckler: Web Content Management ("WCM") is a critical aspect of portal deployment. Without effective WCM, a portal deployment can:

1. Significantly increase the manual overhead of generating, reviewing and publishing content;
   
2. Increase the risk of "stale" or poor quality content;
   
3. Increase content maintenance costs and as a result significantly degrade the cost-effectiveness and business impact of a portal.

Margaret Grottenthaler: Publishing to the legal repositories is handled by specific people. At this point our system is just too difficult for anyone untrained to use. Even as we move to a simpler system there will be a level of review and categorization before something is put into the repository, although we will include just about any legal memorandum without much review.

Publishing to our intranet is managed by our CMS, but we give many different people rights to publish onto the site. Probably well over 100 people have edit rights. Announcements to the home page go through our web editor.

Jamie Booth: Publication rights to a specific knowledge base (or community taxonomy as we tend to refer to it), are defined by the sponsor or sponsoring group. Depending upon content type and location, a combination of resources ranging from the Library Services team, Practice Consultants (acting as a content specialist for the community), member of the sponsoring group or, if the content resides in the document management system, an automated process, combine to identify and surface content.

Mark Zoeckler: Knowledge managers and selected subject matter experts are generally the individuals involved in the review and approval of published knowledge content.

Often other individuals, depending on the nature of the content are involved in the review and quality assurance process, but final publishing is generally handled by a somewhat limited number of people.

Margaret Grottenthaler: So far it has not been that hard because only one or two people are managing it at the moment and working on developing it.

We need to constantly work with the practice groups to keep the taxonomy up to date and to make sure it syncs with those used in other groups.

It’s difficult to work with Marketing professionals who want a matter type taxonomy for a different function than the lawyers do, but you just have to keep explaining to each group what the needs of the other are and come up with a compromise.

Jamie Booth: As the most critical 'infrastructure' component, constructing a well conceived and useful law practice taxonomy has received the least amount of focused attention. There are several reasons for this.

Experience and best practice would indicate that approaching from the bottom up first, in order to ensure that topics and categories reflect real-world processes important to each community or workgroup, and then placed within a broad framework might yield the best result. There seems to be ample evidence that attempting to build a detailed taxonomy from the top down has not been all that successful.

Mark Zoeckler: In a large and complex global firm, taxonomy development can be quite a daunting task. In such a scenario, it is important to involve separate business units in a distributed effort, but ensure a consistent approach and method for documenting and communicating taxonomies and related data architectures.

In a smaller, more controlled environment, a central approach may work, but it is still essential to involve key business leaders or representatives to ensure linkage to key business issues and functions.

It allows the aggregation of information that can be helpful in certain stages of managing a file. The document management part of the file could be managed through the DM system using folders etc. so you don't really need a matter centric part of the portal for that alone. However, if you want to add some other useful things to that feature, like up to date accounting information - e.g., the Work In Progress (WIP) on the file and status of receivables - or a team contact sheet generated from InterAction, or some task management - it helps to create a website for the transaction.

I also think that developers need to understand that matter or client centricity is not the only perspective on categorization, organization or aggregation that would be helpful to lawyers. Pages for types of matters, hot topics, could also use the same techniques. So there is a need to provide for flexibility.

Jamie Booth: In my view, the meta data and content of all types generated from work processes we group within the concept of 'matter-centricity' is absolutely critical to long term and robust knowledge-leveraging strategies.

These work processes are the 'factories', if you will, that produce not only content but also at least some of the context (via meta data) that is vital, fashioning this 'raw material' into shared and applied knowledge.

To not develop the technology, information and knowledge frameworks around these core business processes of the firm would seem to miss the mark in a fairly dramatic way. Is matter centricity a fad? To the contrary, it is a fundamental step forward.

Jamie Booth: Since I'm fond of analogies … we all own, or lease as the case may be, an automobile. To acquire one we go through a process where requirements are defined (handling, cargo capacity, fuel economy, etc.), prototypes developed (select candidate models), a proof of concept executed (test drive), and finally, a purchase is made (implementation). Most of us 'own' the outcome of this process (satisfaction with the selected model) and are responsible for the ensuring the ongoing quality of the experience (basic up keep).

Fundamental maintenance and support (scheduled maintenance and repairs) are typically left to specialists i.e., mechanics. So it should be with the portal. Those that benefit from using properly contextualized and organized content have to take ownership of processes and best practices endemic to authoring it, organizing it and maintaining it.

Technologists own the technology infrastructure and the proper development of the technical components of the overall solution. Practitioners, as knowledge workers, and their knowledge support resources (librarians, PSL's and others) must accept ownership of the content in order to guide it's transformation into actionable knowledge assets.

Jamie Booth: The firm’s portal aggregates news feeds from LexisNexis for top client news, prospective client news, H&W news, competitor news, and topical news (IP, Antitrust, risk management, legal technology). Topical news often surfaces inside specific portal communities. Other information feeds from BNA provide practice-specific content (antitrust, patent, environmental, tax, labor, commerce & law, product safety & liability, securities regulation & law, toxic law).

Outside of LexisNexis, supplemental news sources include Corporate Counsel.net, Factiva and MoreOver. Most of these resources can be browsed or subscribed to (receive via e-mail) as a service enabled by the portal framework. Access to external resources like Lexis, Westlaw and other law practice research services are also provided through links and portlets (gadgets).

Jamie Booth: My view is that most search engines based upon text string and Boolean techniques have not met the need for finding content across the firm. These technologies, as a knowledge management enabling technology, do not seem to scale well across multiple or individual large repositories of documents. Newer technologies have combined search engines based upon semantic or other linguistic statistical techniques and entity extraction techniques with the ability to index repositories that matter most to firms i.e., structured document management systems, unstructured content, electronic mail and other SQL-based systems.

The value proposition being that with less brute force (i.e., structured taxonomies and ongoing vetting processes, etc.) these technologies surface more relevant content to practitioners with less effort and hence less cost to the firm. This is not to say that additional value doesn’t accrue from process and taxonomy development. However, these technologies may well lower these barriers to entry by reducing the time and costs required to identify, organize and add context to the law practice content.

In short, the promise of these technologies is to enable lawyers to find, rather than search, content more accurately, and with less organizational overhead, than their text string and Boolean-dependent predecessors.

Margaret Grottenthaler: We have worked and are continuing to work with our practice groups and different departments, such as marketing, to develop Legal Topic, Industry, Matter Type, Practice Group, Expertise and other taxonomies of both categories and keywords.

We are working with ii3 to develop a system for maintaining a formal taxonomy and applying it to information in our legal repositories, such as memoranda, precedents, seminar and marketing materials, etc.

We feel we need the taxonomy for a lot of different reasons. It’s not just about search, it’s about publishing information and pushing it out by email or to different parts of the portal or to extranets in a personalized way. We need to do that by category and for that we need the taxonomy.

Also, we now get back so many hits in a search of our legal memo bank that we need some system to refine searches or at least categorize the results. Legal terms can be used and used often in a memorandum without the memo actually being about that topic. For example, searching for “abuse” in the competition area is different than in the family law area, but the term competition might never appear in a memorandum on the subject of abuse of market share.