Sysero Know Who

A firms Know How can be described  as the sum of the information available at any given time.  A Know How system, such as Sysero, must then be able to search the majority of information sources (both internal and external) available to a firm to be able to be called a Know How application.  Know Who on the other hand represents the delivery mechanism for Know How and is essentially what makes each firm unique.

 
A Know Who system should make it possible to identify experts in various fields (again internal and external) and should accurately represent the abilities of the firm at a point in time.  It’s not much good identifying an expert for a new matter if they have just left the firm.  Also how can you identify the best expert in a firm for a piece of work or just to ask advice?

Sources of Know Who information

There are numerous sources within a firm that can be used to point us in the direction of the experts.  The most obvious sources would be the CV’s of the fee earners.  Whilst these documents are helpful in providing the reader with a lawyers aspirations, they don’t necessarily represent the most accurate picture of abilities and are always out of date as they are produced at a point in time.

Slightly more accurate information on the fee earners can be gathers from electronic phonebooks and HR records which include location, department, language skills and hopefully accurate contact details.  By harvesting the author details from Web Site articles and document management systems, we can build a fairly comprehensive picture of the work product of an individual.  This information can be consumed by a search engine which can use the document dates to help rank the current skills profile.

Harvesting the best data

By far the most accurate source of fee earners skills however comes from an unlikely source, the accounts department.  Time and billing narratives, and even matter names themselves, are generally short and accurate descriptions of what a fee earner has actually done.  As well as coming with a date stamp, time entries also have a numeric value attached to them - the number of billing hours.  By harvesting the time and billing details, either from the time recording system or from the PMS, a good search engine can filter the best narratives/matter names.  If we then group by the fee earner name and total the billing hours on the matching time entries, we come up with a weighted source for each fee earner against a specific search term.  From here on we just need to sort by the most number of hours and take the top x fee earners.

In Sysero we create a discrete index for the Know Who data and search this with every know how search.  Using this technique, the researcher can soon identify fee earners who appear during searches for specific topics.  Combining this with an in-house HR database for contact and CV details provides a good jump-off point for more advanced analysis of skills available.  Sysero also has an information link above the know who lists which describes how the data is generated.  Once fee earners understand this, they may wish to use more descriptive narratives to help bump their positions in the know who hit lists!

As Sysero can index just about any data source, a similar technique could be applied to other contacts lists including expert witness registers, investigators and process servers, translators, notaries and law courts.