Philip Wood, from Allen & Overy, said his talk was to deal with "the message" and not "the medium", which he would leave to Ivan Darby. His message was "The Problem that is Information Overload". With vivid models (e.g. Allen & Overy process over 4 million pages a year!), he showed how information providers might deal with large amounts of legal information.

Philip outlined the mathematics of legal know-how. As an example: if there are 34 distinct classes of property which may be the subject of a security interest, and there are at least four forms of security interest, and in addition there are a large number of jurisdictions; then these multiplied, as they must be to have legal advice to cover each point, this will produce a colossal number of legal points and combinations. "When you work out the mathematics, the problem is much bigger than people think". Information Overload (IO) in his (and now my) opinion is an "insuperable problem".

Philip went on to suggest that as it was not economical for lawyers on billed time to be performing research, and to be sifting through information, they needed the help of information professionals who use tools such as legal taxonomies to classify legal information to help them. Better still (and in conjunction with structuring the information), he said, was to get the lawyers to condense and distil the information they deliver.

Ivan Darby from Butterworths Tolley spoke on Autonomy: a technology solution. Ivan's snazzy Powerpoint presentation took us through the basics of Knowledge Management (KM), and through to KM tools such as Verity (the industry leader and very expensive), Deskartes, Conerva (previously 'Excalibur') and Autonomy. The Butterworths' product Halsbury's Laws Direct uses Autonomy for its natural language search engine, Eureka.

Ivan went on to speak about Autonomy, which is based on Bayesian mathematics and works by calculating the occurrence of words and their juxtaposition to one another.

Autonomy is more than just a search engine. It has a number of features that can be used to reduce IO. One such feature is profiling, i.e. its use as an intelligent agent which independently sends information to a particular profile. Profiling proved to be of great interest and a number of conference attendees raised issues relating to it during the Q&A session. Ivan recommended Kenjin (Japanese: Wisdom. Available free from: www.kenjin.com) for those who wanted to experience Autonomy for themselves. He did admit, however, that although Autonomy was a serendipitous way of searching, it couldn't beat good old Boolean logic searching.

The Q&A Panel comprised: Stella Dextre Clark, independent consultant and expert on thesauri and the structure of information; Alun Davies, a senior manager responsible for the information team, development of the intranet and data management at Freshfields; Julie Coleclough, (Cap Gemini Ernst & Young), a consultant in knowledge management with a particular interest in knowledge communities and learning; and Ivan Darby, (Butterworths), who demonstrated a profound knowledge of legal IT.

The Q&A session was lively from the start, with great questions and a lot of interaction between the attendees and the panel, and amongst the attendees themselves. The majority of the questions dealt with issues relating to the relationship between IT and KM. A number of attendees asked for clarification about profiling in Autonomy, e.g. merging profiles, security issues, and profiles being linked to the searcher. Other questions related to the development of thesauri, in particular the problem of merging thesauri. Also raised was the development of knowledge communities, i.e. how to find them, how to get them going, and how to market them within your organisation. The issue of trying to get lawyers who are reluctant to use any IT raised a few chuckles.

I found the conference to be very informative, and it was good to meet and discuss various issues with conference attendees. For those who couldn't make it you might like to have a look at Philip Wood's article on IO (see below).

Wood P. Mastering legal know how for international law firms. Worldlaw Business. 41-43, Oct 2000. (http://www.worldlawbusiness.com)