Record and circulate nuggets of learning from day-to-day work

The technology is cheap and easy that allows in-house lawyers to record lessons they have learned during the day. For example, PDA’s let you save your comments at any time on what you just took away from a negotiation, or from a law review article, or from a meeting with outside counsel. Voice recognition software does the trick in the office (See my posts of Feb. 23, 2008: references cited to dictation.). It is easy to cut and past good ideas (See my post of April 27, 2005: knowledge management.).

I think of experiences, insights, practice observations, and ruminations as “nuggets.” For years I compiled my own nuggets on consulting to law departments. My blog posts are nuggets.

These Individual chunks of knowledge are not as stylized as post mortems (aka after-action reviews), which are much more familiar to in-house lawyers (See my posts of Dec. 10, 2005: litigation studies at BellSouth; April 7, 2006: resolved litigation should instruct us; Nov. 6, 2006: after-action reviews; Dec. 19, 2006: test predictive accuracy of law firms; Jan. 30, 2006: ChevronTexaco’s COBALT; Jan. 3, 2008: rarity of post-mortems; and Jan. 13, 2008: learn from unsuccessful practices.).