Of course it is not essential that a partner undertakes the role, but there are several advantages, including:

• signalling that the firm takes KM seriously;

• ensuring KM is integrated into top level decision-making;

• and allowing clout to be employed where necessary.

The KM partner does not actually need to implement; in fact he/she probably shouldn't! Staff qualified in IT, information management and legal skills are invaluable -- but leadership is critical.

• Law firm web sites and blogs with videos. How about video lawyer bios featuring interviews, footage of speeches, television appearances, courtroom performances, etc. Stream the videos on the site, and offer iPod-compatible downloads as well.

• Engaging CLE videos that finally make use of the medium as opposed to the recorded lectures of old. Forget streaming and sell downloads instead so that lawyers can watch them anywhere.

• Deposition videos for your clients to download so that they can see you in action rather than read a dry transcript.

J. Craig Williams of May It Please the Court was an video blogger pioneer. He even has a RSS feed for his what he calls his "vidcasts".

Across the pond, English solicitor, Justin Patten, just introduced a video blog on Human Law, a law firm blog that explores the interlinked themes of law, technology and people.

Patten provides an excellent overview of video blogging here.

Do you know any other law firms who are video blogging? E-mail me.

What I like about Contact Networks and Branch-IT is that these products address two crucial shortcomings of traditional CRM systems.

First, because they mine your firm's e-mail server and create individual contact records from e-mail your lawyers send and receive (filtering out spam and other junk mail) there's absolutely ZERO data entry required by lawyers or their secretaries - genius.

The second thing these systems do is offer various access levels to contact information which can provide lawyers a much greater level of control over the use of their contacts than in a traditional CRM system.

Contact Networks takes it a step further and maintains their own database of companies, along with the executives of those companies, and the system will attempt to match up (based on the domain of the e-mail) an e-mail address not only with a company, but with an individual person. Their database also tracks what industry/SIC code the company is in, which is great information [and] hard to manually keep in CRM.

That being said, these systems aren't meant to replace CRM, they are simply meant to offer a supplement for the all important 'who knows who' questions that arise. CRM is still needed to manage mailing lists, track opportunities, etc. But, if your firm is serious about leveraging its relationship capital, these tools shouldn't be overlooked.

Kellar's well-researched article includes quotes by Tom Baldwin (CKO at Sheppard Mullin), Warren Jones (CIO, Pillsbury Winthrop), Thomas Wisinski (CKO, Haynes and Boone), Don Oppenheimer (Senior Consultant, ii3), Theresa Grote (former CIO, Dinsmore & Shohl, now Chief Innovation Officer, eDirect Impact Inc.), Mark Boggis (International Client Technology Solutions Manager, Clifford Chance), Nina Platt (Director of Information Resources, Faegre & Benson), John Halbleib (Director of Knowledge & Web Solutions, Mayer, Brown), Oz Benamram (Practice Resources Attorney, Morrison & Foerster).

The amount of work that IT departments are outsourcing continues to be relatively small. The majority of respondents indicate that they only outsource 10% or less of IT-related work, such as printer maintenance, document scanning, training and network/server engineering. Less than a quarter say they outsource more than 10% of their work, and usually that was for less than 25% of their IT labor needs.