My Favorite Law Technology News Award Winner

I'm pleased to be able to be able to announce the winners of the 2007 Law Technology News Law Firm and Law Department Awards.  If you're going to be at LegalTech, I understand tables for the awards dinner are still available.   (As a member of Law Technology News' Advisory Board, I'll be there.)

While all the winners deserve congratulations for their efforts, I need to highlight one in particular, the award for " most innovative use of technology in a law firm," which goes to Morrison & Foerster's Chief Information Officer, Jo Haraf, and the firm's Knowledge Management Counsel, Oz Benamram, for their development of "AnswerBase," a one-stop intelligent search system designed to present users with information drawn from every significant system within the firm, starting of course wit the document management system, but also including personnel and human resource records, financial and accounting data (down to the individual time-sheet level), client and matter databases, and even records of alumni.  Perhaps because AnswerBase draws from so many different data sources, its nickname is the "Googlification" of Morrison & Foerster.

The reason I need to highlight it is that I was retained by Morrison & Foerster to lead an analysis and review of AnswerBase vis-a-vis its predecessor Knowledge Management system during last summer and fall, and reached the resounding conclusion that AnswerBase was strongly superior to the firm's legacy systems, by providing highly relevant documents and discovering genuine subject-matter experts within the firm with impressive accuracy.   By interviewing a broad cross-section of lawyers at the firm's New York offices, I was able to determine that the design and functionality of AnswerBase essentially replicate, as I put it in my report, "the way lawyers think" rather than reflecting technical considerations or limitations.  Also as I put it there, the key challenge to any knowledge management system is to understand this fundamental truth:

Associates look for documents; partners look for clients.

So, for example, one associate had this experience:  "I had been researching the requirements for establishing a broker-dealer for a few days with little to show for my work; when I turned to AnswerBase, I found a firm memo outlining all the actual steps within a matter of minutes."

And a partner (and practice group leader) told me simply:  “Clients are very interested in knowing what else you’ve worked on that’s similar.   Why?  They don’t want to pay for you to go learn it:  So it’s very very helpful to find that stuff through AnswerBase.”

Recommind, the firm that provided the fundamental "MindServer" technology underlying AnswerBase, has built an online ROI calculator which lets you enter actual numbers for your firm (such as number of associates, median number of hours they bill, blended hourly rate, etc.) and see what they might mean for your firm.

Recommind has also published my whitepaper on AnswerBase, together with the Appendix which explores bases for calculating ROI.  I invite you to take a look, and again congratulate Jo, Oz, and their team for a fascinating solution to an age-old problem. 

To learn more, including seeing an online demo of AnswerBase in action, click on the Morrison & Foerster logo: