Technology—Property

Technology—Property provides information on current technology and microcomputer software of interest in the real property area. The editors of Probate & Property welcome information and suggestions from readers.

Technology—Property Editor: Seth G. Rowland, Esq. (www.linkedin.com/in/ sethrowland) has been building document workflow automation solutions since 1996 and is Director of Document Services at 3545 Consulting-Global (3545consulting. com).

Share It Forward How to Build a Knowledge Base out of Your DMS

Management consultant, educator, and philosopher Peter Ferdinand Drucker wrote that “knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” Early 19thcentury feminist Margaret Fuller wrote that “if you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.”

There is a vast repository of knowledge in the modern 21st-century law office. With the advent of computers, the knowledge of attorneys and staff with years of experience is captured electronically in the documents they produce each day. For a modern law firm to thrive and grow, this knowledge needs to be kept current, as Drucker admonishes, and to be shared, as Fuller extols.

Knowledge Locked in Farm Silos

Today, few of us grow up on farms, but many of us know the term “silo.” In the modern law firm, “silo” refers to the collection of documents that practice areas and attorneys keep to themselves as their special work product. Many firms still use network-based file shares. These file systems can be cloud-enabled. With products such as SharePoint/OneDrive for business, Google Drive, DropBox.com, ShareFile, or Box.com, documents are still organized into a hierarchy of folders.

There is an infinite variety of hierarchies. Some firms stress ease of access by putting the attorney at the top of the hierarchy; each attorney has her own folder. Sometimes attorney folders are grouped by office or practice area. Other firms put the practice area at the top of the hierarchy; each practice area has its root folder, with separate subfolders for active and inactive cases. Typically, the next level down is the “client” folder followed by an optional “matter” folder.

The file system forces information into silos. The attorney needs to know where to look. Often, attorneys have a private stash of research memos, forms, and model documents. Sometimes, the stashes are organized into topics and shared with the other members of the attorney’s practice group. In larger firms, these stashes may be on a shared drive available to anyone in the firm. Some aspects of the knowledge base may be curated. In other areas, it is often the Wild West, where anything goes.

The Need for Constant Watering and Weeding

In the absence of constant management, these silos of information become dated. The memos of law are not updated frequently enough, or at all. The model briefs may no longer represent the current state of the law. The model agreements may not contain the latest language that the partners prefer. Even if you can find what you are looking for, there is no guarantee that the information is reliable. Moreover, in a file system, there is no clear information on who is the author or knowledge expert from whom to seek additional guidance. Apart from the filename of a document and the folder in which the document is found, there is no information on what treasures may be locked within a particular document. Nor is there information on when the document was last reviewed or by whom or from where the document originated.

The promise of the firm-wide document management system (DMS) was to break open these silos and allow the contents to pour together and merge into one repository of all firm knowledge. But in many firms, this DMS promise has proved hollow.

DMS systems are promising in that all documents are now centralized in a single system that is full-text searchable. When meta-data is added to documents in the form of “profile attributes,” this data is usually applied to organize documents by the client, matter, and document type into matterbased workspaces. But you still need to know where to find a document. Additional profile attributes, such as author, typist, office, or practice area can be used to narrow down the list of documents that are retrieved via search, but, in practice, these DMS systems continue the silo process—except in this case the documents are put into silos by Client and Matter.

Wrestling with Your DMS

The problem is not the DMS system software; the problem is how these systems are implemented. In this article, I will offer some minor changes you can make to your DMS to turn it into a functional up-to-date knowledge base. I will use NetDocuments for illustration purposes. By way of disclosure, in addition to being a lawyer, I am also Director of Document Services at 3545 Consulting Global, and in that capacity, I have been responsible for overseeing over 200 law firm and corporate migrations into NetDocuments. That said, many of the ideas that I will suggest can be implemented in iManage, Worldox, or eDocs/OpenText and to a lesser degree can also be done with “custom fields” or “tags” in practice management systems such as Time Matters, PracticeMaster, Litify, ZolaSuite, and Centerbase. DropBox, Sharefile, SharePoint, and Box have recently implemented “tags,” although these still lack good tools for global search and tag management.

Flag and Profile in Place vs. Flag and Copy:

There is an initial design decision. Do you want to leave the documents in place where they are, or do you want to “copy” the documents into a separate cabinet or library? The first option, leaving documents in place, is easiest to implement, because the attorney needs only to flag the document to have it added to the knowledge base, and then add some additional information as to why the document should be added and how it is to be classified. Start by adding a custom profile question: “Add to knowledge base?” with the options of “Yes” or “No.” By choosing “Yes,” the flagged document will now be included in any saved queries for topics in the knowledge base. This is easy to implement. If you combine it with “Tags,” you can then organize your saved searches into topic-based folders. Adding an item to the knowledge base becomes a matter of saying “Yes” and adding a tag from a master tags list.

The second option, copying the document into a separate cabinet, requires someone to manage the knowledge base. Start by adding a custom profile question: “Add to knowledge base?” with three options: “Yes,” “No,” and “Copied.” The author would then fill out a profile field titled: “Why Add?” and a profile field titled: “How to Classify.” The curator or knowledge management specialist would open a saved search of documents flagged as “Yes” and then review the request and determine how best to classify the document. At this point, the knowledge management specialist would make a copy (or copies) of the document, place the copies in the knowledge base, change the flag to “Copied,” and the document would drop off the list. The attorney could then receive a notification that the document had been added to the knowledge base.

Classifying by Topic—Ad Hoc Tags vs. Taxonomy.

A robust knowledge base can be built with simple tags. Tags are single words or short phrases, separated by commas, that can be used to classify a document. Use an open text field or a memo field to enter several tags on a single document. If an attorney can think of a tag, she can create one. The tag list can be searched using the global search or the advanced search engine in most DMS systems. Tags can be any phrase, a jurisdiction, the name of a court, or the name of a judge. The beauty of tags is that anyone can add them; they are democratic. There is no owner or manager. To use tags, anyone can create a folder containing saved searches of their favorite tags. As new documents use those tags, these documents will automatically appear in the search results.

The drawback of ad hoc tags is that anyone can add them. There is no hierarchy or structure. Tags can overlap; spelling differences between tags can result in incomplete search results. For this reason, most knowledge management systems (KM systems) eschew ad hoc tags as a last resort. Rather, KM systems use several taxonomies or hierarchies. The most common hierarchy is based on topic. Using NetDocuments, we would assign ownership of the topics to departments, practice areas, or groups of lawyers. The members of each group would decide what topics should appear in their section of the knowledge base. Each topic would have its own workspace. The documents in the workspace would be typed. Under one scenario, there would be smart filters based on content type, such as blank forms, research, instruction guides, legal memos, model agreements, templates, briefs, etc. As a document is classified, it will appear in these filters. Further subclassification could be handled by ad hoc tags or short summaries. If desired, folders and subfolders could be added to further organize the documents on a given topic. Alternatively, some topics could have dynamic subtopics to further classify the content.

Jurisdiction and Jurisprudence— Solving the Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies.

Folder-based systems are limited to one folder tree. If organized by topic and subtopic, it can be hard to pick out all those documents that pertain to a particular court, agency, or state. However, in a profile-based DMS, the same document can be classified in multiple ways. Simply add a field called jurisdiction with the choices of the federal agency, federal court, state court, or state agency. Depending on which is chosen, a Jurisdiction Level 2 field can present a dynamic list of agencies, state courts, or federal courts. By combining both topic and jurisdiction in KM searches, the user gets precisely the document needed.

NetDocuments recently announced an integration with PacerPro. PacerPro is a service that searches the case dockets of all cases in federal court where attorneys of a firm are registered as attorney-of-record. PacerPro typically delivers the documents as email attachments. With PacerPro Manifold, the service will instead automatically file the documents into the NetDocuments workspace associated with the subscribed case. Moreover, the document, as delivered to NetDocuments, also includes searchable meta-data fields, including court, judge, docket number, type of filing, name of motion, name of filing party, and more. For an additional fee, a law firm can also subscribe to the court dockets of other cases where the firm members are not attorneys of record if the documents are in the PacerPro master database. The PacerPro fields can be combined with your other knowledge base profile fields to produce incredibly accurate searches. PacerPro is in the process of getting the rights to the electronic dockets in many state courts. Until they do, your KM specialist can manually complete the meta-data fields inside NetDocuments so you can use these fields to handle state court and agency filings.

Knowing Where the Document Came from.

If you are copying a document into a separate KM cabinet or library, you should retain the original meta-data. In particular, you should keep the Client ID and Matter ID, as well as the original author. This will allow the user who finds a “good document” to go back to the original matter workspace and find other useful related documents. If you have the PacerPro Manifold enabled, you would want to copy the document with all the court metadata into your KM cabinet.

Taking Your KM to the Next Level Know Your Experts.

Up to this point, I have focused on how easy it is to get documents into your KM system. The lawyer can flag and tag choice documents, and a KM specialist can refine the classification of the document by filling out additional fields. For this reason, I recommend adding a few additional fields. I would include the author, who would be the member of the firm that authored the actual document. Some authors are known experts on particular topics, and thus their documents would be more useful than those authored by others. If the author is someone outside of the law firm, such as a subject matter expert, you might want to add an “expert” field. That field can be an open text field, or you can also make it a managed field. By using the Microsoft PowerAutomate connector to NetDocuments (it comes free with Office365), you can create a simple PowerApp to allow users to add experts to the NetDocuments lookup table. A managed list ensures consistency in how the expert’s name is added. You could similarly add an Area of Expertise field and a Summary of Expert Opinion field as well. All of these will be useful as your KM system grows.

Keeping Current and Quality Control.

In the early phase, a KM system will be fresh and current as users are excited to contribute their knowledge. But over time, the documents can become stale and out of date. For that reason, you will need an actual document date. The date a profile was created or the date a document was last modified is often different from when the actual document was created. As the amount of content grows, you will want to have domain experts review the content for quality and currency. I would recommend adding the following additional profile attributes: name of the reviewer, last review date, a review score (1–10 scale or 0–100), and review status. The review status should flag documents that are current, in-process, need to be rewritten, are out of date, or have been superseded.

If a document is flagged as “needs to be rewritten,” alerts can be sent out to the original author of the document suggesting that he update the document or designate an associate attorney to do the work. NetDocuments does allow co-editing of documents using Office365. I used that co-editing feature to write this very article.

Building Template Sets.

A KM system is not limited simply to storing copies of briefs and agreements that you might want to use as models for future documents. It can also store templates, outlines, and checklists. Many firms have organized forms committees for individual departments or practice groups. These committees are tasked with creating and maintaining model forms to be used as the starting point for transactions or even court filings. These documents can be stored in a KM system. Using version control, they can be regularly updated to ensure the attorney always uses the most current version of the form.

By applying a security model, these forms can also be made “read-only,” effectively functioning as templates. These templates can then be organized into sets or binders. NetDocuments has a tool called SetBuilder, which is a cross between an outliner, a binder, and a checklist. A group of model forms can be combined with instruction guides into an ordered outline. This is a great way to build instruction manuals, discovery outlines, and due diligence checklists.

Next Steps

There are many ways to build knowledge bases. Some are quite complex and expensive. Many are a bit much for the average law firm. One day, your firm may want to invest in a dedicated KM System. If you don’t currently have a document management system, this article should give you another good reason to get off the fence. If your firm already has a DMS system, you can use the options outlined above to leverage the DMS your firm already possesses and stretch it into a useful and usable Knowledge Management System.

Published in Probate & Property, Volume 36, No 5 © 2022 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

Probate & Property September/October 2022 63