H. Personal Knowledge Management for Lawyers

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 315-316

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The foregoing discussion focuses on knowledge management at the firm-wide level and assumes some level of infrastructure and staffing to implement knowledge management initiatives. However, not all firms or organizations will have the size or infrastructure to support such initiatives. As such - and even for large firms with some sort of infrastructure for knowledge management - there is something to be said for personal knowledge management where the individual lawyer takes responsibility for his own efforts to work smarter. Personal knowledge management for lawyers will often involve one or more of the following activities:

· Current awareness: It is important for lawyers to stay current with legal trends and recent changes in substantive law relevant to their practice. Staying current can be achieved through any number of

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commercially available products and through subscribing to RSS feeds to law-related blogs and websites (some of these blogs and web-sites are listed in Section J, below in this chapter).

· Continuing legal education: Closely related to current awareness is the need for lifelong learning for lawyers. Increasingly, continuing legal education (CLE) is being made mandatory by individual provincial law societies.⁴⁷There is usually a valuable transfer of knowledge made possible by attending CLE seminars (or, increasingly, webinars). Most sessions are taught by experts in their field and are practitioner-focused (as opposed to being too theoretical).

· Precedent and research binders: It is relatively simple for the individual lawyer to set aside copies of good examples of agreements, clauses, or research. The old-fashioned method of keeping such material in a tabbed binder is actually quite simple and produces an easy-to-organize and easy-to-access body of knowledge content. Taking the process one step further, it is relatively easy to digitize this material and organize it on your computer with any value-added annotations you want to make on the digital copies.

· Information literacy: Lawyers process a large volume of information. By training, they are taught to be logical and question everything...