Thank you to our legal experts for another informative issue of the Australian Banking and Finance Law Bulletin. Read my General Editor's note to find out what we have lined up for our readers in another excellent ensemble of comprehensive commentary on the hot topics and latest developments in banking and finance law and practice. It is hard to believe that this, the November edition, is our second-last issue for 2014. Stay put for our December edition. It will be a compelling read!
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"Best Practice in Knowledge Management" is the award category at the annual LawTech Summit that recognises outstanding achievement in the process of collating, organising, sharing and analysing knowledge.
This year, law firm HWL Ebsworth took home the award. HWL Ebsworth was recognised for its innovation in response to the significant legislative change brought about by the new Personal Property Securities (PPS) regime, which has direct implications for many of its clients. Thank you again to Peter Frankl of Legal Practice Intelligence for his report titled "HWL Ebsworth LawTech award for best practice knowledge management reflects changing attitude to information in law firms", which includes my comments relating commercial information management. Peter Frankl reported that HWL Ebsworth uses a new cloud based visual information management platform called Encompass, which has enabled the firm to improve the efficiency and accuracy of its commercial search and review, particularly when it comes to PPS related information. It has also enabled the firm to finalise due diligence quickly, provide prompt advice and minimise risk. I wrote about visual information management in two earlier blogs, which you can revisit here and here. If you need assistance with commercial information management, such as a visual information management solution, just contact us for assistance. The modern day law practice has entered into a new age and applies equally to practitioners working in-house to those in private practice. Thriving and surviving in today's legal landscape is determined by our ability to utilise and manage data and information as well as embrace and adopt technology.
This has led to the emergence of commercial knowledge management as a new discipline. What exactly is commercial information management? Commercial information management refers to methodologies or software platforms that help an organisation or firm search, review and manage commercial information they use in the process of delivering their core services (such as the provision of legal advice). Commercial information is all around us – information derived from data from the ASIC registers, the PPS Register, AFSA’s National Personal Insolvency Index and Land Titles searches are all examples of commercial information. Data is just facts and figures. Information is data with relevance and purpose. What we really want is information, not just data. Information, especially commercial information, that is well managed is useful, and can convey a trend, indicate a pattern, or tell a story. Better still, we can derive knowledge that germinates from interpreted data and information. And knowledge is the ultimate competitive advantage. Three things you should know about commercial information management: 1. Conversion from data to information to knowledge is key. Data needs to be converted, first into information and subsequently into knowledge, otherwise its use is limited. Commercial information management aids this conversion and deliver a real and measurable return on information. 2. Commercial information management is data agnostic. Data agnosticism refers to the ability of data to work with various systems. The message here is that commercial information management does not need to be customised for a single system only. In fact, it can be quite flexible. 3. Commercial information management is linked to competitive advantage. The ability to generate useful commercial information (which impacts on the ability to create new knowledge), and properly manage that process is at the heart of an organisation’s competitive advantage.If we can have the ability to extract and analyse data which can potentially be converted into insights, and then present this knowledge in a format that enables decision makers within the our organisation or firm to act, and we can do this better than others in the market. This presents a real competitive advantage. Four benefits commercial information management can deliver to a law practice: 1. Improved Discovery and Access. How? By providing lawyers with easy and transparent access to accurate and timely data and information. Data and information that is easily discoverable can be shared and utilised for a variety of purposes, from conducting due diligence that involves multiple practice groups in a firm, to providing legal opinions in cross-border transactions involving legal teams working in different jurisdictions. 2. Improved Integration and Accuracy. How? By collecting data once, ensuring its integrity and quality. This is an incredibly powerful tool for risk management, as commercial information management helps to ensure a legal practice can confidently rely on any reports and advices it produces based on data gathered and information derived. 3. Improved Decision-making. How? By providing better information to support analysis, decision-making and risk identification. The best decisions are made when people understand the full picture. In a legal practice, professionals bring years of experience and intuition to the decision making process, drawing information from various sources, considering the context and extracting insights to make informed decisions. Commercial Information Management increases the quality of the information ‘input’, requiring less effort to process and organise complex information to draw meaningful conclusions more efficiently. 4. Decreased Costs. How? By all of the above! Decreased costs is a direct outcome of improved efficiency by improved management while eliminating risk and waste. (These four benefits have been derived based on Griffith University’s Information Management Framework.) Human intellectual capital + innovative technology = achieve your goals. It is worth mentioning here that there is an aspect of commercial information management that relates to human judgement as well as an aspect that relates to technology and science. Both the use of judgement and technology and science provide and add value. Embrace commercial information management and contribute strategically to your legal practice’s ultimate goals. This post first appeared on the ALPMA blog "A Survival Guide for Legal Practice Managers". If you are interested in learning more about commercial information management, you can watch my free on-demand webinar "Emerging Discipline of Commercial Information Management", now available from the ALPMA On-Demand Learning Centre. ALPMA on-demand webinar - the emerging discipline of Commercial Information Management (CIM)29/8/2014 Each year, organisations and firms spend thousands of dollars purchasing commercial information from brokers and regulatory sources like ASIC and PPSR in the process of delivering their core services. Commercial Information Management (CIM) is an emerging discipline being implemented by these organisations and firms seeking to leverage and maximise the value of this information.
In an on-demand webinar provided exclusively to ALPMA members (by Encompass Corporation, ALPMA's Summit 2014 Live and On Demand Partner), I outline the principals of CIM and the 4-stage process of CIM. I also look at the benefits of CIM and how to maximise your return on information. Get ahead of the pack. Learn about CIM. Thank you to Peter Frankl of Legal Practice Intelligence for interviewing me for his special report on legal knowledge management - "Bring Your Precedent Documents to Life - Just Add KM”.
For legal advisory assistance or knowledge management solutions, just contact us for assistance. At today's Sinch Online Legal Services Conference in Sydney, I presented on visualisation as a legal solution and explained how it is helping lawyers adapt and respond to change.
To learn more on what I said about visualisation in law and the 3 key things that a legal practice can use visualisation technology for, read my blog on Encompass News. My presentation was also reported here. Only very recently, Forbes published an article on data visualisation, or “dataviz”, as they have called it. It pointed out that progressive organisations today are using a wide array of dataviz solutions to ask better questions of their data and make better business decisions. I asked the conference attendees this question – how is your legal practice using dataviz? I wanted everyone to have a think about whether they have an interactive solution designed for professional audiences that can tease out connections and turn complex data into simple pictures. I certainly hope the answer is yes, because, among other things, embracing dataviz also means creating differentiation and enhancing competitive strength. This Friday (2 May 2014), I will be speaking at the Sinch Online Legal Services Conference 2014. This is a full day event which will take place at the City Tattersalls Club in CBD Sydney.
The conference "will feature 25+ leading legal business & IT visionaries who will share their real-world experience about the most crucial issues affecting you and your clients". I am delighted to speak about a topic close to my heart - visual information management. The reason why the practice of law is experiencing major changes is largely because of information and communications technologies are now easliy available and at very competitive prices. Law firms need to respond to the revolution and look for new solutions that will enable them to respond fast. A good example of this tecnology is visualisation as a legal solution (such as Encompass). I have written about this in my earlier blog - "Five reasons to make visualisation your friend". Read more about the Sinch conference on Legal Practice Intelligence, or you can access the conference details directly from Sinch's website. I will share my thoughts on the conference over the coming weeks. A survival guide for legal practice managers - five reasons to make visualisation your friend9/10/2013 Search and discovery makes up a bulk of a law firm’s routine tasks. When each search generates a few pages of linear information in the form of PDF reports and each matter requires a few searches, the result is pages and pages of information. This information then needs to be sifted through to exactly what’s relevant. If a dollar value is allocated to the time it takes to do this task, it’s easy to see how the cost of this laborious process can eat into a law firm’s revenues.
As a practicing lawyer I can appreciate the challenges that lawyers face when it comes to management of commercial information. Working with Encompass, however, I have realised that data visualisation can be a lawyer’s best friend. Encompass has recently released their whitepaper titled "Lean Legal" showing how visualisation of information can help lawyers escape the world of words and enter a world of pictures. This helps cut down hours of reading and searching into minutes and even seconds. While the concept of visualisation is not new - we all remember the old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’- the legal world has only just started to understand its benefits. Visualisation enables us to see the concepts that we are learning in a more interesting and more useful manner. One area where visualisation is having an enormous impact is in interpretation of legal search results from registers like ASIC, NPII or PPSR. So here are five reasons why your firm needs to get familiar with data visualization: 1. Trimming the fat: Visualisation makes it easy to understand and analyse information at hand. This enables legal practitioners to take a ‘lean approach’ to information management for operational efficiencies in a challenging and competitive environment. 2. Getting there faster: Lawyers always need to quickly extract relevant content from many searches and use that information to advise a client, prepare transaction documents or draft a legal opinion. Visualisation technology helps lawyers speed up processes without compromising on the quality of their advice. 3. Good housekeeping: More often than not, the searches from a matter need to be referred to at a later stage by other members of the team. Searches may also need to be repeated as a matter develops (mostly just before a deal settles) for comparison, making the initial search extremely important. Visualisation technology based on Software as a Service (SaaS) platform allows easy access for stored information and visualisation makes it easy to everyone to understand it. 4. Competing and differentiating: With the help of advanced visualisation software, lawyers can abandon archaic traditional practices and drive better engagement by presenting their advice (at least in part) in a visual format. Visualisation software can also help uncover new business opportunities by showing clear links between people, properties and company ownerships, securing clients for additional consultation. 5. Taking down barriers: Regular cross-border and cross-departmental communication, whether it is with clients or team members, is essential to the success and reputation of a law firm. By building a picture of the critical information involved in a matter, lawyers can collaborate and communicate more effectively. Language, distance or technical legal knowledge are all barriers that can be minimized through the use of visualisation, not to mention the ability to share information quickly in a universal language. Technological innovation in the form of visualisation is great news for the modern day legal practice. Given the magnitude of searchable data, we need something in our toolbox to facilitate lean data management practices. Lean means getting the most out of a process with the least amount of time and effort spent, eliminating waste of any kind. An interactive solution designed for professional audiences that can tease out connections and turn complex data into simple pictures is a clear step forward. This post first appeared on the ALPMA blog "A Survival Guide for Legal Practice Managers". |
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