Blogging as a personal knowledge management tool : More reason for lawyers to blog
Boston knowledge management attorney, Doug Cornelius, offers one more reason for lawyers to blog. Use a blog as a personal knowledge management tool.
Reporting on his panel presentation with leading business bloggers at last week's Enterprise 2.0:
One common theme among the panel was blogging as a personal knowledge management tool. We all found the blog to be a great way to capture information in a way that is easy to categorize, where it is easy to find the content. As a personal knowledge management tool, I blog for me. These notes are for me to reuse. That you are reading is a by-product.
As a lawyer for 17 years my credenza, desk corners, and bookshelf were full of articles and CLE materials with post-it notes. Never wanted to lose that suggested brief on voir dire, request for production, or sample cross examination of a medical witness. Plus I had great notes in those outlines from the trial lawyer seminars I attended.
Problem was that I could only manage a fraction of the information I collected. We kept a file cabinet with some of the stuff. But that only worked when everything got filed there and if we named the folder by the same name we would label the concept a year later when we went digging for the stuff.
If my secretary and I didn't spend a day or two wading through all the good stuff at the end of the year, a lot of it would just get tossed in the garbage. Equal value to the garbage was stacking the stuff on those shelves in the back regions of the law office only to be cleaned out when we moved offices or retired.
With a blog, you file what you read or hear and want to keep in a blog post. Make a note or two offering why the information is worthwhile. Upload key files to your blog. Blog live from seminars you attend. Why make hard copy notes that end up getting tossed or lost?
A blog gives you complete navigation by category & sub-category, tags, and a complete search. You can find what you want over the years.
Better yet, by cleaning the info up a little - it only takes 5 minutes more - you can share what you keep with your target audience. Showing prospective clients, other bloggers, the media, and referring lawyers what you follow and how you do so is an excellent way to display your expertise and commitment to a practice area.
Doug made this same point of sharing your knowledge in his post:
A blog is an excellent way to display expertise, whether the blog is internal or external. It is one thing to paint yourself as an expert. It is much more effective to prove your expertise through your writings and information you push out.
Obviously if a blog is internal, you're only showing your expertise to others in your firm or organization. I agree with Doug that 'internal blogs (at least in the classic sense) are just limiting their audience.'
I've got thousands of posts in this blog. 95% of the posts reference something of value I saw or heard. I wanted to keep the info as part of my personal knowledge management or share it with you guys with a little commentary. In most cases it was probably a little of both.
No way I could have done that with post-it notes - even the electronic ones called bookmarks.
Kevin;
For most lawyer, this is the most important reason to have a blog.
Every lawyer needs to categorize their thinking into the relevant legal boxes.
Not every lawyer needs to be marketing through a blog.
There is some truth to this, though I would not blog for just this reason. But I do love it when potential client calls and asks me whether we have handled such and such matter before and I tell them that we have not only handled it, but we have written about it and I will then email that person the posts on it. It builds instant credibility.