Lawyers, Knowledge Management, and OPML

If you've ever worked in a law office, you might be familiar with a common problem: Lawyers often do similar things over and over again, but they don't always have a very good way to keep track of what they've done before so they can efficiently reuse that work the next time they need it. For example, if you're a criminal lawyer, you're going to write a lot of motions to suppress evidence. How do you keep track of the work you've done on those motions to suppress so that you don't have to do it all over again the next time you have a related issue?

Another problem in law offices is collaboration. If you're working a case with other attorneys, paralegals, interns, etc., how do you keep everyone updated on what you've done, and how do you follow what others have done?

I believe this is what some people call “knowledge management”—how do you “manage” the knowledge in your firm? And I understand that there are lots of commercial packages available that attempt to help lawyers with these tasks. Many are built around an hourly billing model and are very complicated. For example, the GW clinics use Amicus “practice management software.” I found it to be slow, inflexible (you work the program's way or no way at all), hard for users to use and understand, and really too complex for what we wanted to do.

So what if you want something simpler—something without all the billing and client tracking features, something that just helps you keep track of your research and your collaboration with others? Enter OPML and Instant Outlining.

If you don't read Scripting News I'm not sure why you would know or care about this, but Dave Winer has been building a new OPML editor, a sort of outliner on steroids that allows you to create what he's calling “instant outlines,” or outlines that people can subscribe to—almost in the same way that you can subscribe to RSS feeds.* I can't describe it much better than that because I haven't seen or used it, but from what I've read, it sounds like it could be a really awesome way for people in a law office to communicate about the cases they're working on.

To see what I'm talking about, read this thread describing how the outliner can work into a collaborative workflow. And here's another description of the outliner at work and some thoughts about how it compares to email, instant messaging, and other means of communication. With those descriptions in mind, imagine that you're an attorney in the lead on a murder trial. You've got two attorneys helping you out, and all three of you have interns doing research and investigation for you. Plus you have an investigator and a paralegal helping out with the case. How do you keep all of them informed about what's going on? Why not use an outliner to keep your notes and let them all subscribe? They can keep their own outlines so you can follow what they're all doing. This would mean you wouldn't have to repeat new news six times, and you could probably have fewer long meetings where everyone reports on what they're doing. I've only worked on a couple of cases like this, but in those cases, I really think instant outlining could have been a big help. Another big advantage is that it keeps time-stamped records of the case as it develops so it would be easy to go back through and see what you learned when and all of that should make it less likely that you'll lose or overlook any little aspect of the case.

In addition to its collaboration possibilities via instant outlining, this new outliner promises to be a great way to track legal research within a firm or legal office. Take those motions to suppress, for example. Every lawyer in your office could have a “motions to suppress” outline; when you needed to write such a motion, you could check in on those outlines and gather all the relevant research that people in your office have already done. In addition or in the alternative, the office could maintain one “motions to suppress” outline to which everyone could add. It could live on the office server so that everyone could access and update it. The top level nodes of these outlines could state a sub-issue related to suppressing evidence, and the subnodes could collect the relevant cites and points of law to deal with that issue. Then, the next time you have to do a motion to suppress, you scan through the outline for related issues and jump right to the research. If you find anything new about that issue, you add it to the outline.

Finally, this mythical outliner (which is still just in beta testing, apparently) can also be a blogging tool. I've long been jealous of the way Scripting News can combine little one-line posts w/longer, multi-paragraph posts -- each with its own permalink. Now the tool used to create that sort of blog is going to be available for everyone (or at least to all Windows users; maybe Mac users soon). This won't necessarily be great for lawyers or knowledge management or whatever, but it's certainly interesting.

* OPML is the format most feed aggregators use to keep track of your RSS subscriptions, and it's also the format used by outliners like Omni Outliner or Aquaminds NoteTaker. Its great virtue as far as I can tell is the ability to expand and collapse different levels of your outline, and to move those levels around easily so you can organize and navigate through a lot of information quickly and easily. I've found it to be a great format for taking notes in law school.

Posted June 25, 2005 12:51 PM | law general opml