Information and Knowledge Management at South African Law Firms

Global and national law firms alike operate in a challenging business environment and managing the firm's information and knowledge assets is increasingly viewed as a key factor in efficient legal service delivery. In legal practice, information management technologies, for example intranets, portals, workflow management systems, document and content management systems, case and project management systems and online dispute resolution systems are becoming important means of legal service delivery. The reason for applying information management technologies and implementing knowledge management strategies in law firms is not only to satisfy clients' growing need for a trusted online platform to interact with legal service providers, but for law firms to capitalise on their intellectual assets, to continuously modernise legal practice management, to empower lawyers, to increase productivity, to use time efficiently, to transfer skills and knowledge from senior to junior professionals, to improve service delivery and to gain competitive advantage. This article firstly reviews the role of information and knowledge management in providing an effective legal service to clients and compares foreign and South African law firms' information management related contexts, challenges and benefits. Secondly, it presents the findings of a survey conducted at South African law firms based on their knowledge management practices. The aim of the article is to provide insights into law firm knowledge management and its effect on providing legal services in an online business environment.   

Cognition-based approaches for high-precision text mining

This research improves the precision of information extraction from free-form text via the use of cognitive-based approaches to natural language processing (NLP). Cognitive-based approaches are an important, and relatively new, area of research in NLP and search, as well as linguistics. Cognitive approaches enable significant improvements in both the breadth and depth of knowledge extracted from text. This research has made contributions in the areas of a cognitive approach to automated concept recognition in. Cognitive approaches to search, also called concept-based search, have been shown to improve search precision. Given the tremendous amount of electronic text generated in our digital and connected world, cognitive approaches enable substantial opportunities in knowledge discovery. The generation and storage of electronic text is ubiquitous, hence opportunities for improved knowledge discovery span virtually all knowledge domains. While cognition-based search offers superior approaches, challenges exist due to the need to mimic, even in the most rudimentary way, the extraordinary powers of human cognition. This research addresses these challenges in the key area of a cognition-based approach to automated concept recognition. In addition it resulted in a semantic processing system framework for use in applications in any knowledge domain. Confabulation theory was applied to the problem of automated concept recognition. This is a relatively new theory of cognition using a non-Bayesian measure, called cogency, for predicting the results of human cognition. An innovative distance measure derived from cogent confabulation and called inverse cogency, to rank order candidate concepts during the recognition process. When used with a multilayer perceptron, it improved the precision of concept recognition by 5% over published benchmarks. Additional precision improvements are anticipated. These research steps build a foundation for cognition-based, high-precision text mining. Long-term it is anticipated that this foundation enables a cognitive-based approach to automated ontology learning. Such automated ontology learning will mimic human language cognition, and will, in turn, enable the practical use of cognitive-based approaches in virtually any knowledge domain --Abstract, page iii

Design-by-Analogy Using the WordTree Method and an Automated WordTree Generating Tool

Design-by-Analogy is an approach that is widely embraced by engineers and designers seeking innovative designs. The identification of analogies for use in engineering design problems is usually a spontaneous action that is brought about by accident and not by a systematic design process applied during the idea generation stage of new product development. A Design-by-Analogy method developed to lead designers systematically to analogies that can be useful for solving design problems is the WordTree Method. The WordTree Method uses the semantic relationships between verbs, extracted from design problems, to lead engineers and designers to potentially useful analogies. The WordTree Method is a relatively new design method, and as with any new design method, there is room for improvement. In this thesis, a tool called WordTree Express (WTE) was developed to automate the generation of the database-based WordTrees used during the application of the WordTree Method. This tool (WTE) showed, from an experiment, that its implementation had a positive effect on the opinions of the engineers and designers who used it for solving a design problem. The effects found from surveying the participants suggested that the participants were more likely to apply the method in their future design problems with the WTE tool than when they applied the method without the WTE tool. Although the WTE tool did not show statistical significance (p<0.1) in increasing the number of analogies identified by the participants, compared to the non-automated method, it did enable the process of identifying analogies to be done faster. Tools designed to perform tasks faster and more efficiently usually tend to have a positive effect on its users. Different ontologies were studied for their value in the application to Design-by-Analogy in engineering. Recommendations for further work advancing the WordTree Method and contributions to Design-by-Analogy are presented in the future work section