Knowledge Management and Portal Technologies

In parallel with the evolution of portals in law firms was the evolution of search. At first primarily a facet of the document management system, this DMS search was poorly used for three broad reasons. First, the scarcity of the solutions themselves ' many firms disabled the functionality for that reason alone. Second, because of the 'signal-to-noise' ratio: unless the firm had the foresight to impose and enforce classification schemes, searches returned few useable results sets. Last, the complexity and number of search syntaxes meant that queries were often too broad. Also, in most cases, no context was captured during the process of saving to the DMS, so the documents returned were, at best, information not knowledge.