Last Thursday night I took part in the St Vincent De Paul Society  (“Vinnies”) CEO Sleepout in Luna Park, Sydney. The Sleepout challenged me and other CEOs to experience homelessness for a night to help raise money and awareness of homeless people. Well, it was an incredible experience – inspiring, moving, exciting, exhausting and ultimately fulfilling – all in one night!

We arrived in the rain, registered inside, were given CEO Sleepout logo beanies and then directed back outside, where we were pointed towards a stack of cardboard sheets, told to pick up one or two and find a place to put our sleeping bags down.  After some jostling, most of us found cover under an awning, or otherwise out of the rain, but still outside on a concrete slab.

We gathered up back inside for a series of speeches and presentations for several hours, broken up with dinner by a bowl of soup and piece of bread.  The speeches featured everyone from a local Weatherman MC, to the CEO of Vinnies in Sydney, to government ministers, CEO and Vinnies spokesman and sleepout Ambassador Dick Smith (for those not from Australia, the iconic Dick Smith is an older, Aussie version of Richard Branson, with philanthropy substituted for ego-mania.).  Most interestingly, interspersed with the speeches were four current or former Vinnie’s clients, who bravely got up on stage in front of 220 CEOs, told their stories and in most cases, performed for us (2 singers, 1 playwright/actor).  In between all this we were invited to discuss with our seatmates and a mike was passed around for reflections, pledges and the like. 

I took my turn at the mike to suggest that 220 CEOs could up the ante and dig deeper into our own pockets and put our money where our bodies were, so to speak, and challenged each CEO present to either double their own gift or cough up another $500 (or more), with the goal of going from $500K to $600K in that evening (they had computers and swipe machines set up to accept further contributions).  Not sure if my American ways were too confronting for the local crowd, and we didn’t get to $600K then and there, but did jump $20K in a matter of 30 minutes or so…and the folks from Vinnies were very excited!

After the program ended around 11:15, some folks headed straight to their bedroll while most of us milled around and talked, too keyed up to sleep. By 1:30 am, most were in our make-shift beds, trying to sleep.  So did I?  Not much.  Many of you were worried about the cold or the rain but these were not issues, only too many thoughts rushing through my head combined with the reality of a hard concrete slab.  And I should add, for any MDs in the crowd, that while the sample size was only 6 in my immediate area, I can safely report that 50% of CEOs in Australia have a serious snoring problem!

By 5:45 am when they were supposed to wake us up, more than half of us were waiting for coffee, followed by some morning media, and then back to work.

The event has been crowned a huge success by Vinnies and the local media.  The original goal was to register 100 CEOs and raise $250K.  All in all 220 CEOs slept out and the grand total so far is over $540K.  And there is a lot of interest in taking this beyond Sydney to many other Vinnies cities around the globe.  Donations are still being accepted at http://www.ceosleepout.org.au/donate.

Would I do it again?  You bet!!!

In September last year (2008) CCH asked professionals across the Asia Pacific what they thought of Web 2.0 – you can read the full report here.  One of the questions we asked was what professionals thought about the value of particular social networks. 

Here are the results for legal professionals who use social networks for work purposes at least once a week.

Source: CCH 2008

Last year, Facebook was seen to be more useful to social network-savvy lawyers than LinkedIn, although 50% did believe it was useful. How about legal professionals in general, not just those who are already using social networks?

Source: CCH 2008

Unsurprisingly the numbers are much lower, and there is a clear perception that a network specifically for lawyers would be more useful than LinkedIn or Facebook.  Of course, some of our respondents may not have been familiar with LinkedIn and therefore underestimated its potential relevance.

Now what is particularly interesting is that we conducted this survey in September, and since then the number of people from the legal industry registered on LinkedIn has doubled from 406,000 to 840,000 (numbers from Stem Legal’s Law Firm Web Strategy Blog).  It would be interesting to see if many of our respondents who originally expressed little interest in LinkedIn have changed their minds.

Over the last couple of months I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about the future. While working on our three year business development plan I was looking at what new services CCH should create and in which direction we should take the business. Last week I attended a two day CCH leadership and innovation program In Kuala Lumpur and enjoyed some intelligent, exciting and creative discussion around what CCH might look like in 2012.

Whatever direction we take we will get lost very quickly if we lose touch with our customers. After attending Book Expo America 2009 Kassia Krozser blogged on Booksquare that:

“the publishers who take the time to really listen to their constituency, from distributors to readers, will survive the ocean crossing into the future (and there will be some rough seas ahead!) while the publishers who don’t will be lost at sea.”

I agree with her sentiment. So how do CCH listen to their ‘constituency”? One very successful way is by employing a user –centered design process called contextual design. Wolters Kluwer, our parent company, use contextual design to build new systems and services and the process has produced our most effective solutions for customers. Our new online platform Intelliconnect was built with our customers using contextual design and it just won the The CPA Technology Advisor’s Tax and Accounting Technology Innovation Award in the US. Mike Sabbatis, CCH President, accepted the award and said:

“We share this award with our customers, who participated in hundreds of hours of interviews and testing to produce a new model for research that enhances their productivity and efficiency,”

Intelliconnect is a great success because it was a joint effort: without collaboration with our users it would not be so powerful.

I have been a member of the Legal Knowledge Management Forum (previously the Precedents Network and now hosted by the Law Society of NSW) for years but since joining CCH I have been amazed by the number of other KM groups out there.  A major aspect of my role is staying in touch with what’s going on in the legal industry.  Part of staying in touch with the legal industry is staying in touch with people I’ve worked with so earlier this year I signed up with Linked In. 

As well as finding some people I haven’t seen since university and reconnecting with a number of more recent colleagues I’ve been exploring the various groups on Linked In that many of them subscribe to.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover a number of groups aimed at KM professionals including some specifically for legal KM.  Three of the groups I’ve joined are Knowledge Management for Legal Professionals, e-Legal and APAC Legal KM Professionals.

The Knowledge Management for Legal Professionals group is a group of over 1,400 people involved in KM in law firms, corporate legal departments and the legal industry more generally.  The group is US based but has an international membership.  Recent discussion topics include: taxonomies in Sharepoint, blogging for legal professionals, law firm social media policy and e-discovery.  There are also links to information / articles on external websites recommended by members of the group. 

As the name implies, e-Legal is a group for anyone interested in legal IT systems, services and new technology and currently has more than 8,000 members.  KM and IT tend to have a symbiotic relationship so as a KM practitioner I’m also interested in IT.  Currently there are discussions on e-discovery, e-filing and software applications relevant to legal users.

The group I have joined most recently is the APAC Legal KM Professionals group.  This group is similar to the Knowledge Management for Legal Professionals group but with an Asia Pacific focus. It is a newer group than the other 2 and currently has approximately 51 members.  The group’s owner is Justin North from Janders Dean (see Justin’s blog here).  I think this is potentially a very useful group for Australian legal KM practitioners and will be watching its development with interest.

As well as discovering groups on Linked In I’ve also been introduced to the NSW Knowledge Management Round Table and earlier this month was lucky enough to attend a session.  I thoroughly enjoyed the day and was amazed to discover that KM for lawyers isn’t all that different to KM for engineers - more on that next time.

After spending most of the last 25 years either working in law firms or studying law (or both) I made a sidewise step earlier this year and entered the world of legal publishing.  Since joining CCH in mid March I have learned a lot (and not just about publishing).  Although I’ve worked in legal knowledge management for nearly 10 years there are all sorts of KM resources out there that I either didn’t use or didn’t know about.  It’s frightening how much relevant knowledge can escape even a knowledge practitioner.

Blogs for example: I knew they existed, but had no idea how many there were written by or aimed at lawyers, knowledge managers and legal knowledge managers.  I certainly didn’t suspect that I would ever be facing the task of writing a blog post in the context of a job that I’ve held for about 2 minutes – scary stuff!

Being a boring, methodical lawyer means that the first thing I do is research, and I’ve found some interesting sites.  While in practice and legal knowledge management I knew about Justinian, but I’ve now discovered Practice Source as well (if you’re reading this you’ve already discovered the latter!).  Linda Moore one of my CCH fellow bloggers has an interesting personal blog  KM Librarian.  We all know about Lawyers’ Weekly, but have you seen Lawyers’ Weakly?

On a serious level there are a number of US sites with information on blogging for lawyers; one I enjoyed in particular is Real Lawyers Have Blogs.  It has heaps of information on how to start blogging and, more importantly, why to blog in the first place.  It’s far more complicated than just sitting down and typing.  I have also discovered some CCH / Wolters Kluwer blogs both Australian based and from overseas. I particularly like Kluwer Law International’s Arbitration Blog which has a great group of external contributors (including at least 1 Australian academic).  CCH Australia has also recently started a HR Blog that (among other things) has some pointers for employers dealing with swine flu.

These are all wonderful resources and I had no idea they even existed.  If you have a favourite legal or KM website or blog please let us know.

As well as discovering blogs and websites I didn’t know about I’ve also been discovering groups of knowledge management practitioners.  More on KM groups next time.