A month back Martin White and I ran a breakfast breakout event for professionals in Legal Knowledge & Information Management. Those who follow mine and Martin’s musings might recall the event ‘The Future for Legal KIM: an outside in perspective’. Our aim was to present our thoughts to a group of Legal KIM’ers and seek their views.

These were the topics we foresaw as being important in 2015:

• Lawyers come and go – capturing knowledge at speed
• Collaboration and KM beyond the firewall
• Getting the best from virtual teams
• Bringing it all together – legal project management

As it turned out we were not far off the mark as the feedback from the postcards we invited the delegates to write on indicated.

Once we consolidated all the replies on the day an interesting picture emerged. (Click on the picture below to make it more visible)

In law firms of more than 250 partners the biggest issues were around virtual teams and project management. Yet all acknowledged they were not yet in a state of readiness to tackle them. Among the smaller players the biggest worry was around loss of knowledge.

other priorities

Not unsurprisingly the comments provided a valuable insight into their thinking.  Smaller firms (at the start of their KIM journey) were looking for basic KM:

• Basic entry level km – completely new to it / evolving information research service & integrating with K activities
• Provision of rapid and easy access to previously captured knowledge / Technology to simplify the process of intergration

Larger firms wanted something different (note the reptition of collaboration):

• Collaboration inside the firewall / Expertise locating
• Combining & improving KM systems / Organising our know how in a better way across the whole organisation
• Support dept personalities working together (Marketing collaborating with IS, KM)  / Improve collaboration generally
• Content clutter and records management / Risk & Security / Knowledge & UT goals & Strategy

So much to ponder on – watch this space for answers!

and finally

Grateful thanks to the four people who made contributions to Plan Zheroes (the event’s nominated charity).  For those who forgot and anyone else who feels moved to contribute, they can do so here.

This Thursday the Plan Zheores team are at London’s GLA for the launch of their new virtual presence which has the potential to make PZ the ‘Uber of surplus food’. Here’s a snapshot of what it will look like and why the team is so excited.