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challenging economic times, the legal industry is under pressure to work more efficiently. Developing these rules of the road or “best practices” as part of your KM strategy can help your firm effectively manage the flow of information in firm systems and make the delivery of legal services more efficient. Attorneys work in a shared environment where any information they create and save in firm systems can be retrieved by others and has potential KM value. Establishing a recommended set of guidelines helps attorneys, and others, know what is expected of them when using firm systems. As a result, these best practices will help improve the quality, accuracy and reliability of information stored as well as the firm’s ability to retrieve this information quickly and efficiently. The ability to retrieve quality information from these systems consistently helps attorneys work more efficiently and enables firms to leverage the information to support firm’s business needs such as KM, business development and matter management. Making best practices a part of an overall a KM strategy supports a firm’s delivery of high value legal services to its clients. MAKE BEST PRACTICES A PART OF YOUR KM STRATEGY Best practices can serve as the catalyst to get attorneys to contribute information to firm systems. Getting attorneys to share information about their matters can be difficult if they do not see the need to do so. Incorporating best practices can show attorneys how contributing information about their matters will allow them to work efficiently and support the business needs of the firm. Best practices can benefit firm systems. attorneys driving on the knowledge management highway.” “Knowing and following the rules of the road have never been more important for The document management system (DMS) is a good example. Best practices provide the “road signs” needed for attorneys to profile documents properly with the correct metadata (e.g., name and document type) in the DMS. Proper profiling ensures that the information is organized and can be easily identified for retrieval. For firms that use enterprise search technologies to retrieve information from existing systems like the DMS, accurate profile metadata is essential. These technologies rely on profile metadata to retrieve the most relevant search results. Implementing best practices improves system efficiency in retrieving information. Best practices can also benefit your long- term KM strategy. Firms considering future investments in enterprise search or portal technologies can implement best practices today to properly identify and organize the information in existing systems. Then, when a firm is ready to invest in these technologies, the www.iltanet.org Knowledge Management 39