Ep 267: How A Legal Services Agency Developed An Award-Winning KM Portal to Enhance Access to Justice

LawNext

At the Knowledge Management and Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City, Legal Services NYC was named as the inaugural winner of the LexPrize award, which is designed to recognize groundbreaking ideas in knowledge management and innovation for the legal industry. It won for its development of the Legal Services NYC KM Portal, a custom-built knowledge management portal designed to enable its legal professionals to more easily access important resources and more effectively collaborate with each other.

LSNYC, whose 12 offices and more than 500 attorneys serve nearly 110,000 clients annually, developed the portal in partnership with Sente Advisors, a company that helps law firms and legal organizations develop innovative projects. Designed to be a home for user-submitted and curated knowledge that is easily searchable, LSNYC describes the portal as one part social network, one part intranet, and one part enterprise search.

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the KM&I for Legal conference and had the opportunity to sit down there with two of the people who were instrumental in the portal’s design and development:

• Alexander Horwitz, chief operating officer at Legal Services NYC.

• Kate Boyd, chief operating officer at Sente Advisors.

In today’s episode, Horwitz and Boyd share the story of the problem they set out to solve, the constraints they had to work within, and how they went about doing it.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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