Developing a Law Firm Taxonomy

Today's Modern Law from Findlaw had some gems in it. In particular, I thought people interested in KM or indexing generally might find this article useful: Developing a Global Law Firm Taxonomy, Inside-Out - this month's Technology Tech column by Jason Marty.

He compares two different ways to develop a taxonomy for a law firm. He relates this back to work done at the global law firm Baker & McKenzie, where they looked to the experience of other law firms before jumping into this area. From the introduction:

We were interested to note that for some firms, the difficulties a global taxonomy project entails are causing them to focus more energy on other aspects of content management - search, information architecture and workflow. A global law firm taxonomy though, if accepted and adopted, can provide tremendous benefits to working lawyers, not only by helping them find needed content, but also by helping organize activities and content development efforts.

Nov. 5/08 - link updated