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Looking Outside the Firm for On-Point Work Product

By Justin Hectus
The value of a good lawyer is not proven in redrafting maps of familiar ports, but rather it is secured by successfully navigating uncharted waters. Sophisticated purchasers of legal services understand this, and they expect today's lawyers to quickly locate, validate, update and utilize past work product where it is prudent to do so. Forward thinking firms now utilize tools to effectively mine their own documents, but I was recently introduced to an amazing concept: Why stop looking for precedent documents at your firewall, if you can just as easily access documents filed by your competitor? The ramifications of this new concept are astounding.

Looking Inside the Firm

Responding to various client demands (faster turnaround and lower costs among them) and a mandate to improve internal realization rate, many firms have begun to seek ways to make better use of their existing stores of documents. These initiatives are broadly lumped under the term 'knowledge management.' Not long ago, knowledge management was the domain of a few attorneys who understood the value of maintaining precedent or form files. (See, Knowledge Management and Portal Technologies.) It saw its broadest (and perhaps most aggravating) incarnation in firm-wide e-mails, in which an individual attorney might request information on a given topic from his or her peers.

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