Helping a firm capture and share its knowledge is the raison d’être for anybody in Legal KM. There are many tools and techniques a KM professional might use to guide a firm down this path. I’d like to share some reasons as to why blogs deserve to be one of them.

Some of those reasons are around effectiveness, which is pure techno-nerdery. I’ll try to cover those last (literary self-flagellation for writing too much about technology and not enough about benefits and outcomes).

More interestingly, I think blogs can help you develop a knowledge sharing culture.

KM culture

In my experience, most KM professionals struggle endlessly to prove their relevance to the lawyers they work for. When people get busy, KM happens ‘later’ (read: never). Of course there are exceptions, but KM tends to be the domain of the interested few. This is fairly topical KM leadership issue. The practice isn’t really dedicated to KM, at least not in a measurable way.

In David Maister’s book Strategy and the Fat Smoker, he equates this type of scenario to telling a smoker that cigarettes are bad for them (or an overweight person that a diet would be good for them).

Your lawyers and partners may know that KM is a good thing, but that won’t get them to do anything about it.

In Maister’s view, you need to do the following to change people’s behaviour:

1. Change their routines
2. Change the scorecards
3. Demonstrate leadership’s commitment
4. Establish principles
5. Get them to volunteer
6. Ask them “are you in, or out”

And so, the obvious question is, what does this have to do with blogs?

Simple, blogs can facilitate a number of these points.

For example:

Change their routines – Ask your people to write a short post whenever they finish an interest client project. Share news about the major client won by a Senior Associate. Do this for everything worth sharing. New boilerplate document, blog blog blog. Even if you don’t make the lawyer write the tool, KM partner roams the office asking for content.Change your scorecards – On big posters around the office (and on your Intranet), tally up the contributions at all levels AND tally up how valuable people find them (use ratings, page views, whatever). Conversely, have “absentees” list. Maister is big on embarrassment avoidance as a motivator. Contributions over the course of the year need to be consider during appraisal time.

Demonstrate leadership’s commitment – The KM partner needs to spend time reminding people about the importance of KM, and practice heads need to write posts of their own. Odds are a practice already have internal newsletters and deal announcements, so the copy for those can go straight into the blog.

Establish principles – I’ll probably lose a few people here. Give your lawyers a “KM allowance” & have the time spent count towards their YTD billable hours. The blog give people a simple way to contribute (see above) without having to create a new precedent or long-winded article.

For the last two, even I can’t think of how a blog can help you. Those are people issues, pure and simple. KM Systems are all about facilitation and are never the means to an end (despite my clear bias to all things techie). For a group that shares little or no knowledge in an organised way, they are cheap and cheerful.

Personally, I would focus my attention on a group blog.  Individual blogs inevitably will suffer from holidays, boredom, business, etc.  Oh, and no writing about what your cats did on the weekend.

David Maister is brilliant, plain and simple. His latest book is full of ideas which may help you on the way to KM nirvana (blog or no).

Techno-nerdery

I’ll whiz through these pretty quickly.

• Blogs are a means to produce RSS. Client news, practice news, industry news and firm news can all be rss-enabled and whisked away from the inbox
• All professionals should considering the use RSS as drastically improve one’s ability to maintain current awareness. While I worked for Linklaters, every single I showed RSS to saw it as a top KM Systems priority.
• There are tools out there which let your Outlook-living lawyers receive RSS feeds as email (by default). They don’t even have to know they’re using RSS or blogs.
• Blogs are insanely simple to setup. You can install them on a memory stick. No excuses on the technology front.

There are all sorts of techie reasons why blogs are helpful, but think hard about what you want to achieve and how you can best get your lawyers to manage their knowledge.

After my last post about blogging, I got a helpful suggestion from Doug Cornelius to consider why I blogged.

Initially, the idea was to learn about blogging, to improve my writing and to build my personal brand. Since then, it’s grown to include sharing ideas & meeting people.

The sharing component is the biggest draw for me. I like to share ideas, build them up and, if appropriate, knock them down. It’s all about creating an opportunity to build up ideas. While the blog is fairly one-sided, a pedestal for me (and Matthew) to voice our views, I see it as an invitation to a discussion. In one specific instances the blog led to an email exchange which I learned a lot from and was able to help somebody.

The ability to
connect with people you might never otherwise meet / facebook / email /
twitter is pretty also fun. Building a global network has never been so simple, and it’s great to touch base with people who have similar interests. Among my friends and family in London, it’s safe to say that none of them are technology/km bloggers.

From a personal KM perspective, I do find it useful to capture my ideas on
the blog, and have created a personal Google CSE so I can find them easily in the future. The blog is only a small piece of my personal KM system (have to one since I’m a geek), but is growing steadily.

The need to practice writing was completely a function of my computing background. With a CompSci degree, essays were rare so I never developed the discipline to write in an engaging way. Blogging makes for a good way to practice writing in a way that emails or business cases do not. Truth be told, I’m starting to enjoy it.

As with Doug, the personal brand side is less important, but clearly valuable. Its lends instant credibility to one’s interests and ideas, especially when you’ve taken the time to share them publicly. I’m pretty happy with what we built here, and am keen to see it grow.

Doug’s reasons

Rather than make you hunt for Doug’s comment, I’ve pasted it below:

For me, I primarily blog for me. If I find something very
interesting I post the link and some reason wh
y I found it interesting.
I generally do this so I can find that something latter. I also use it
capture my notes from conferences. I use the blog to help me gather
thoughts and synthesize information which turns into original content.
As a result, my blog is a personal knowledge management tool. I find
the search and tagging of the blog platform to be superior to anything
else I have found.

A secondary reason I blog is to keep a small group of people that I
know informed about the things I find interesting. The blog acts as a
news filter. This is more a by-product of the primary reason.

The last reason is just blatant self-promotion. I put my stuff out
there as part of my personal brand and to keep my name in front of
people. This is the least important to me but very rewarding. (Just as
you mentioned in “On ego” and “On network building”). My blog is about
“me” but it is nice to know that people like “me.”

It’s been eight months since we started Knowledgethoughts and already we have learned much about public blogging:

• blogging requires commitment
• writing content is more fun than just linking to articles
• *fun* is the operative word
• your ego plays an important role
• it’s a great way to build your network

On commitment

Blogging is definitely something you need to set time aside to do. Up until the end of January, I was dedicating time to blogging regularly and wrote a fair whack of stuff. Since then, posts have been few & far between (although I had a vacation in Feb). I think the deal one should strike with themselves is that subscribes deserve at least one good post a week.

Take a look at the numbers:

• April 2008 (2)
• March 2008 (4)
• February 2008 (2)
• January 2008 (17)
• December 2007 (22)
• November 2007 (13)
• October 2007 (6)
• September 2007 (8)

Not good enough. With the rss feeds I subscribe to, those who post less than once per week tend to be ignored (unless they are brilliant, which I am not).

On content

I mentioned in my last post that I tend to prefer drafting original content rather than just linking to interesting things. I’ve tended to follow Doug Cornelius’ approach (mix of linking with commentary and original content). I find the former rather dull, but do like to share the interesting things I come across. I have a view on how to improve this, and will incorporate that into a later post.

Excluding the blog homepage, the most popular pages all derive from the wiki. People are interested in:

• Legal KM and Firms
• Leading people and thinkers
• Mediawiki templates
• Perspective / fun
• Thought starters
• Software to know

The most popular blog post was “Intranets the way of working for Law Firms?“, where I commented on a report by Jane McConnell which I felt overemphasised the importance of people living on the Intranet (it doesn’t actually). Since then Jane and I have discussed her report via comments on each other’s blogs and via email. It was a great experience where we both learned something. It also highlighted the ease with which email and the written word can be misunderstood.

On *fun*

In a perverse way I derive a measure of fun from writing here. I learn and read more as I look for things to write about (Google Analytics, Adsense, Custom Search Engines), and while I tend to be more interested in the technology side, blogs like Adam Smith, Esq. regularly expose me to new and interesting ideas.

Without that fun element, blogging becomes little more than a one-sided conversation, with little feedback and ultimately no readers. Just look at the stats from the past month. The promise of writing a how-to for the Google CSE kept me from posting because I dread writing user guides.

On ego

There’s definitely an element of ego at play here. Perhaps its the attraction of presenting ideas which others value (measured in comments), seeing one’s Technorati authority climb (currently sitting at 15) or just the satisfaction of seeing the number of visitors increase over time. Without feedback this would have died after a couple of weeks.

On network building

Even internationally, the legal community is not that big, but until recently it would be unlikely to connect with people in other cities without meeting them at a conference or workshop. Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve chatted to many people I’d never meet otherwise. As I move into a consulting capacity, who knows where these connections might come in useful.

For me, public blogging is a completely different beast than blogging on behalf of a firm or blogging inside the firewall, and is something I look forward to continuing for the reasons I stated above.

One of the things I’ve found about blogging is that it’s more interesting to write original content as oppposed to just linking to articles.

However, over at KM Space Doug Cornelius has uncovered a tidbit from Mark Miller which is too good to ignore, which can help you to determine when blogs or wikis are appropriate for you.

Simple test: one or two people providing content, use a blog; many people providing content, use a wiki.

Genius!

Well, just back from holiday and far to much happened while I was away to write about everything. Still, I  thought I might highlight some of the articles I found the most interesting.

In no particular order:

KMSpace

• Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?
• Do Wikis Belong in Law Firms? Of Course They Do!!
• Knowledge Management with Folksonomies and Tagging
• Putting the Social into Social Media
• Top Priorities of Law Firm Knowledge Management for 2008
• What’s Hot and What’s Tough in Law Firm KM
• Why Blog? – Why Every Client Should Want an Attorney Who Blawgs
• Interwoven Express Search = WOW!!

Adam Smith, Esq.

• Don’t (Only) Sweat the Small Stuff
• Professional Firm Leaders: The Book from Harvard Business School
• Unintended or Unanticipated?
• A Contrarian Bounce?
• Is Your Managing Partner Still Making Jet Engines?

Andrew McAfee

• Why Not Widen the Flow?
• Signs In the Times
• What I Learned About Fidelity
• Here Comes the Neighborhood

Intranet Blog

• Free Sharepoint & more Web 2.0 mediocrity

Column Two

• Wiki markup has no future
• Death to the RFP?

Tom Davenport

• How Analytics Help Build this Champion
• What Medicine Can Teach Us About Decision-Making
• Some Predictions on Prediction Markets
• Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?

Jessica Lipnack, author of Endless Knots has posted the results of a blogger survey she conducted a while ago.   The survey asks four questions, and includes the responses of 35 bloggers including yours truly:

1. Has blogging improved your writing?
2. How long, on average, does a good post take?
3. One unusual thing that’s come from blogging
4. Advice to new bloggers

It’s worth a read for anybody considering blogging.