Legal Knowledge Management: A Holistic Model.
George T. Tziahanas approaches knowledge management in a very practical and straighforward way in a recent white paper, Legal Knowledge Management: a Holistic Model.
He states that in “LRC's experience with workproduct databases demonstrates a minimum hit-rate of 25% in searches for highly relevant, existing content,” resulting in equivalent savings in legal research and writing costs.
The difficulties in managing legal KM revolves around the fact that most valuable information, legal briefs, opinions letters, contracts, memos, etc. are “unstructured” content. Typical work product applications index the entire document under a broad category, making it difficult to find specific important, discrete clauses without “wading through an enormous number of irrelevant documents.” [via excited utterances] [LawLibTech]