Why is Google’s famous slogan “organizing the world’s information” rather than managing the world’s information? If managing something means controlling it, knowledge management is really about controlling information. But isn’t that like saying we need to control the internet? The producers of information will always win – in the long run, there’s just no way you can hope to control all the data that people create.
An early knowledge manager grapples with data from the Venerable Bede
In the early days of the internet, several companies tried to categorize all the web pages out there into a giant index. If you wanted to buy a car, you might click on the “Automobile” category, then the “Consumer Reports” or “Dealerships” categories and browse through the various listings, which were of widely varying quality. But this task of indexing and categorizing the internet quickly proved entirely unworkable – there were simply too many pages out there, there were more going live every day, and a mere index could not tell you which of those millions of pages were actually worth looking at.
Companies are now facing this same challenge in microcosm. Information is exploding – in emails, documents, archives and even voice mails. We’re become shockingly adept both at producing new information and recording it.
So why should companies take the same approach as those early internet portals?
The only feasible alternative is “Knowledge Organization” rather than “Knowledge Management” – companies need an internal Google to allow the consumers of information to consume it in the way they want, rather than being forced into a particular framework that works for one point in time and for one type of user.
This problem comes up in spades with Contract Management Software (an unfortunate name, usually abbreviated as CMS). Every company beyond a certain size needs to come up with a process for tracking its agreements. This is a huge problem – without some way of handling this, deadlines are missed, cost-savings opportunities are lost, and even worse, agreements might be unwittingly breached. The current solution is to use software that imposes such a process. But producers of legal text, consumers of it and managers of the system are forced into a framework that the software designer thought would work. And it does work, so long as you have enough people willing to manage all this contractual data and so long as those people buy into the software’s way of doing things.
But in the long run, it won’t scale. For one thing, producers of information have a limited tolerance for entering meta-data. This drove me crazy in my law practice, where it seemed you couldn’t open or save a document without spending 10 minutes filling out a form. Patience for doing this just won’t last. I’ve heard of situations where a law firm knowledge manager would actually bribe attorneys with Starbucks cards to get them to fill out the forms. The costs of managing all this information increases rapidly with its volume. Worse, as we continue to get better at producing and recording information (think social media), this problem grows in a non-linear (read: scary-fast) way.
Hard day at work today? Actually, work was fine – it’s the meta-work that’s killing me! (Photo by Fred Fehl)
We need a Google for contracts – something that organizes the information without trying to control it. Imagine typing in a query like, “Leases needing to be renewed in the next six months,” and having the software give you a list of hits, with the relevant language from each agreement at your fingertips.
The cost savings such a service provides would be staggering. It would dramatically reduce the need for manual review of these agreements (especially if delegated to outside counsel) and neither the producers nor consumers of the information would need to slow down their work to deal with meta-data.
If all this sounds futuristic, it’s actually quite easy to envision. Technology to parse and recognize text has advanced dramatically over the last ten years, thanks in large part to eDiscovery. When it comes to legal language, particularly form contract legal language, the challenge of recognizing and extracting the desired provisions becomes quite manageable.
So what’s needed is a computer that can understand a Google-like query to find the relevant provisions among a company’s contracts. Not necessarily a computer to actually understand the language, but simply to locate it (Google doesn’t understand the hits it generates, it just finds them for you). That’s the next generation of legal tech – on the horizon now but rapidly coming into view.
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