Litigation is All About Knowledge Management
Recently, during the course of a lengthy jury trial in Austin, my California co-counsel and I discussed what each of us considered to be the most important elements of successful litigation. We both agreed that successful litigation — or at least efficient successful litigation — is all about knowledge management, i.e., "accessing, evaluating, managing, organizing, filtering, and distributing [knowledge regarding the facts and the law of a case] into actionable knowledge via a technology platform." An attorney can come up with all kinds of great strategies, and discover all kinds of wonderful facts but, unless such information is contained and managed in a way that it can be readily and thoughtfully presented to a judge or jury, it is just intangible and useless clutter. An attorney seeking to master knowledge management must always ask him- or herself, every step of the way, "How am I going to memorialize and later readily use this piece of information in conjunction with other pieces of information to tell a convincing story?" The sequential answers to this question mark the path toward effectively prosecuting a client’s case.
