Legal’s Knowledge Information Sharing System to harness the power of gray matter for legal matters
2016-09-15
Intelligent life may not yet have been discovered beyond Earth, but it already exists in legal, including Johnson Space Center’s Legal Office. There, a pilot program—the Knowledge Information Sharing System, or KISS—seeks to capture those heavily deliberated thoughts, rulings and decisions from attorneys agencywide into a searchable database that will benefit the approximately 100 NASA legal experts facing a constant deluge of inquiries. It’s just one of many JSC 2.016 innovations looking to maximize center resources and create efficiencies for an organization humming with activity.
“We had 4,000 separate action items last year,” said JSC Chief Counsel Bernie Roan, who is also a member of the Steering Committee working to implement KISS.
With the weight of that kind of a caseload at JSC, “it’s important to do knowledge sharing,” Roan said. “We put out a lot of work product. I can’t say that all of it is 100 percent recyclable, but a certain amount of basic work that one attorney has done can be used by other attorneys. Even if the facts diverge, you use a certain amount of basic information in the previous work product and go from there.”
Despite an informal knowledge-sharing system in place—the lawyers generating these decisions day in and day out—a knowledge database could lessen the time and resources needed to process a case.
“Right now, if you think about it, we have very experienced attorneys in a number of areas, and they sit there as their own living, breathing data banks,” Roan said. “And people come in and ask questions, but by doing that, you’re doubling the amount of legal effort going into solving the case.”
If an attorney has already deliberated over and written up a similar case before, logs it in a database of documents, and that information is captured and accessible to other attorneys, JSC not only gains consistency across the board, but predictability as well.
Boring and predictable may sound very vanilla, sure, but in terms of client relations, it can be an asset. It also alleviates clients “lawyer shopping” to look for the answers they most want to hear.
“If you don’t have that sense of predictability, you’re going to have a line a mile long outside the office,” Roan said.
There are five components of KISS that will make it instrumental in helping lawyers quickly evaluate past cases and apply them to new issues.
“The principal one is retrieving information,” Roan said.
Also critical to the system is matter tracking.
“If I go in [KISS] and say I want a bid protest on small business size, I can see [once it’s fully up and running] who is working on that right now among the 100 or so attorneys, and I can go and talk to that person and we can share ideas.”
The bigger elements will take some time to come to fruition. What will come together hopefully by next spring is the low-hanging fruit, the other three pieces in the mix: the news feed, the blogs/chat/social media portion and the directory. Combined, these tools will enable lawyers to read about similar cases and rulings and collaborate more effectively with subject-matter experts.
We have some of the brightest minds to choose from when it comes to deliberating legal matters. That said, knowledge sharing is very much about showing good stewardship of expertise—essentially, being “good ‘green’ attorneys in the sense of recycling what we do to the extent that we can,” Roan said.
While there’s more work to be done, such as identifying (or creating) the right software to plant KISS and grow it, the cross-center working-level Tools and Culture Committees are united in their goals to revolutionize how we capture, retain and access vital caseload information.
“It’s a shame to let the prior intelligence and efforts and thoughts of really smart people go to waste,” Roan said. “It doesn’t mean that they’re 100 percent recyclable in 100 percent of the cases, but there’s value there, and we’d be crazy not to take advantage of it if the price is right.”
If the pilot program is effective, the database and software could also be adopted by other directorates and NASA centers, enabling change on a grander scale to make the overall human spaceflight program successful.
The Knowledge Information Sharing System seeks to take the lessons learned from similar initiatives in the past to make the database user friendly and easy to access to encourage wide acceptance and use.
Catherine Ragin Williams
NASA Johnson Space Center
“We had 4,000 separate action items last year,” said JSC Chief Counsel Bernie Roan, who is also a member of the Steering Committee working to implement KISS.
With the weight of that kind of a caseload at JSC, “it’s important to do knowledge sharing,” Roan said. “We put out a lot of work product. I can’t say that all of it is 100 percent recyclable, but a certain amount of basic work that one attorney has done can be used by other attorneys. Even if the facts diverge, you use a certain amount of basic information in the previous work product and go from there.”
Despite an informal knowledge-sharing system in place—the lawyers generating these decisions day in and day out—a knowledge database could lessen the time and resources needed to process a case.
“Right now, if you think about it, we have very experienced attorneys in a number of areas, and they sit there as their own living, breathing data banks,” Roan said. “And people come in and ask questions, but by doing that, you’re doubling the amount of legal effort going into solving the case.”
If an attorney has already deliberated over and written up a similar case before, logs it in a database of documents, and that information is captured and accessible to other attorneys, JSC not only gains consistency across the board, but predictability as well.
Boring and predictable may sound very vanilla, sure, but in terms of client relations, it can be an asset. It also alleviates clients “lawyer shopping” to look for the answers they most want to hear.
“If you don’t have that sense of predictability, you’re going to have a line a mile long outside the office,” Roan said.
There are five components of KISS that will make it instrumental in helping lawyers quickly evaluate past cases and apply them to new issues.
“The principal one is retrieving information,” Roan said.
Also critical to the system is matter tracking.
“If I go in [KISS] and say I want a bid protest on small business size, I can see [once it’s fully up and running] who is working on that right now among the 100 or so attorneys, and I can go and talk to that person and we can share ideas.”
The bigger elements will take some time to come to fruition. What will come together hopefully by next spring is the low-hanging fruit, the other three pieces in the mix: the news feed, the blogs/chat/social media portion and the directory. Combined, these tools will enable lawyers to read about similar cases and rulings and collaborate more effectively with subject-matter experts.
We have some of the brightest minds to choose from when it comes to deliberating legal matters. That said, knowledge sharing is very much about showing good stewardship of expertise—essentially, being “good ‘green’ attorneys in the sense of recycling what we do to the extent that we can,” Roan said.
While there’s more work to be done, such as identifying (or creating) the right software to plant KISS and grow it, the cross-center working-level Tools and Culture Committees are united in their goals to revolutionize how we capture, retain and access vital caseload information.
“It’s a shame to let the prior intelligence and efforts and thoughts of really smart people go to waste,” Roan said. “It doesn’t mean that they’re 100 percent recyclable in 100 percent of the cases, but there’s value there, and we’d be crazy not to take advantage of it if the price is right.”
If the pilot program is effective, the database and software could also be adopted by other directorates and NASA centers, enabling change on a grander scale to make the overall human spaceflight program successful.
The Knowledge Information Sharing System seeks to take the lessons learned from similar initiatives in the past to make the database user friendly and easy to access to encourage wide acceptance and use.
Catherine Ragin Williams
NASA Johnson Space Center