The Lawyer's Guide to Working Smarter with Knowledge Tools

Marc's book breaks down legal knowledge management into easily accessible steps through well thought out processes and tools. This book will help law firms make great leaps forward in capturing and getting the most out of the knowledge assets they have.
-- Catherine Bamford, CEO and Founder, BamLegal

This ground-breaking guide introduces lawyers and other professionals to a powerful class of software that supports core aspects of legal work. The author discusses how technologies like practice systems, work product retrieval, document assembly, and interactive checklists help people work smarter. Almost every practitioner can work smarter, and software helps make that possible.

This book supplies the guidance for you to determine what technologies are right for your practice and your needs. It provides a clear roadmap on software tools for doing legal work--not just by lawyers but also by other professionals in traditional law firm settings as well as in corporate, governmental, and nonprofit contexts.

In using the term knowledge tool, author Marc Lauritsen covers software with significant knowledge content that does something, that applies or processes knowledge beyond just storing or moving it. The book looks at these software tools that can improve the effectiveness your legal work:

• Case/matter management
• Work product retrieval
• Document assembly
• Interactive questionnaires
• Intelligent checklists
• Expert systems
• Decision support tools

As the author explains, few lawyers are even making optimal use of software that came out a decade ago. We owe it to ourselves and to our clients to do better. You can realize many practical benefits by working smarter. More time, more impact, more professional satisfaction. Knowledge tools are increasingly central to those benefits. My goal is to help you seize them.