Knowledge management

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In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights.
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What in the old days we used to call a librarian, but since that role can be safely covered by Google, now a person who professes to know all about document assembly, artificial intelligence, machine learning, distributed ledger technology and smart contracts, but actually just knows more about them than the General Counsel, and is therefore assured tenure as long as she can keep up with the latest buzzwords.

But in knowledge management is fundamental part of excellent legal practice. We all do it — the JC is basically a knowledge management system — there is a scale opportunity if you can get people to share their systems in an intuitive way. The best example of this is, of course, Wikipedia. But the scale is literally enormous: Wikipedia has nearly a billion monthly users, but only 125,000 odd active editors, each month.[1] Historically, about 1 percent of its active editors have generated 77 percent of the site’s content.[2] So the user/editor ratio on Wikipedia is one in ten thousand, for any old editor, or one in a million, for an enthusiastic editor.

References

  1. Unique devices per month, according to Wikimedia’s stats engine; editors per month, according to Wikipedia’s stats page.
  2. According to Vice magazine