Whatever you do, please don’t call it a “brief bank.”
Language choices have powerful effects, so it does matter what one calls things, to good or ill effect. And for some 40 years legal services field programs have sought the holy grail of a “brief bank.” Having worked in five different field programs and two support centers in five states over 35+ years, I can personally attest that every one of those organizations thought they had or wanted or envisioned or aspired in some way to a “brief bank.” As if.
There are legions of reasons why, in practice, the brief-bank model never really works for most field programs. Among those are program management and resource priorities that obstruct it or at least don’t value it; lack of a commonly understood and shared purpose among its target users (you know, those pesky “employees”) why it matters to have such a model; and an impractical — or at least poorly designed — approach to creating and maintaining the model (you know, like, no one is really responsible to make it happen and/or actually find the time or resources to maintain the damn thing, whatever form it takes).
Within the legal services community, the notion of a “brief bank” long ago morphed into something akin to a vestigial organ: Not entirely useless or without function, but pretty much something no longer used as it once was. If ever it was. And even by its own self-referential term as a “bank,” one gets the message that this is a model for something that one does not actually use on a daily or regular basis. Rather, things of apparent value are placed there for storage, for safe-keeping, for later retrieval but for good reason not readily accessible because they must be secured. You can count on it being there. You can bank on it.
Actually, you cannot. Because the real purpose for which it exists, more often than not, is typically useless. The old-school model “brief bank” was a collection of hard-copy documents stored in your individual office file cabinet (or that pile of folders over there, in the corner of your office); or down the hall somewhere in a different cabinet maybe maintained by someone else (or in a pile of folders that the “someone” would label and organize “by the end of the week”). On a good day (OK, on a really good day), you or someone else could remember which document was about what and where it was located. On most days, not so much. And with the emergence in the last 20 years of the digital-document work style to which we are now accustomed, the “brief bank” has become a case or project folder on your local or a shared network drive. You know, something like our Auburn Office shared directory, in all its indigenous glory:
Surely, this is an advocate’s digital paradise, right, all there but for the taking? … if you can remember what is there … where it is … and find it. (“Oh, what you’re looking for is in a different office? I’ll get back to you.”) And that’s one of our smaller offices. (However, you’ve got to love the use of caps here, sort of a poor person’s metadata model for attributing value to some files.) I thought to illustrate here the four times as large, charmingly nuanced (née dystopic) horizontal and vertical structure of our flagship Sacramento Office, but it was too vast in dimension to use as a visual example. But you get the point.
I must admit, I cringed a touch when reading the fifth “Purpose Served: Knowledge Management” element in LSC’s recent recommendations on baseline technologies for legal services field programs. Stating “what should be in place,” it invokes “pleading and brief banks” as its primary concrete paradigm. As I was saying, language is powerful and apparently the choice of this concrete terminology in the more abstract context of “knowledge management” has not changed. It should.
The concrete challenge for legal services program is not to create a “pleading and brief bank.” The challenge is to identify and organize and manage and make “findable” a wide range of documents and other files that have shared value within the organization. (“Sample pleadings and briefs” are only one piece of that paradigm.) Within that larger framework, the LSC baseline technology recommendation regarding the need for knowledge management is right on the money.
And Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) is a typical example of this challenge within the post-merger world of legal services. The structural scale and geographic reach of and substantive range of advocacy by LSNC exacerbates a fundamental dilemma all modern legal services field programs suffer: How does one make it fast, easy and intuitive for program staff to find and access all the different types of “knowledge content” within the four walls of the organization?
Within LSNC’s organizational structure there is a wide range of substantive advocacy and administrative expertise, specialization and skill sets, all of which are sources for shared information and knowledge. By “information” I mean that the organization has a variety of documents and other digital data types — most commonly, these are word processing files, PDF documents, spreadsheets, presentation files, HTML pages and client databases — that have content the organization perceives as valued and useful. By “knowledge” I mean that the information exists in a context that offers understanding. A “usable” document offers the promise of shared knowledge because it brings understanding of the information it contains from one person to another.
But there’s the rub: What does a non-profit organization like LSNC do to bring to the surface the usable knowledge of all, i.e., all the specifically identified and valued, usable content wherever it exists within the limits of the organization that can and should be shared and available to other LSNC staff? That is the core question the Findability Project will attempt to answer in a practical way that works for a legal services field program.
The LSNC approach is to build a network infrastructure that supports enterprise search, premised on deployment of a Google Search Appliance. It is also premised on thrashing out practical ways to identify, organize and maintain the valued documents and other files that will be the target of enterprise search. It also premised, as importantly, on figuring out as “user friendly” a way as we can to ensure LSNC staff use the system, want to use the system, know why they would want to use the system … to find what they need.
Hence, the Findability Project.
