This session focused on the practical situations in which lawyers look for knowledge in order to deliver legal services to their clients. It identified some typical 'use cases' and considered ways in which knowledge can be delivered to the practitioner - even without them having to look for it.

This presentation covered the practical issues encountered by a law firm in its quest to improve findability of one of its key resources - knowledge and information. The speakers discussed their approach to building taxonomies, the tools and processes deployed and how they anticipate their taxonomy will be applied and consumed by lawyers and publishers. The LexisNexis part of the presentation focused on the challenges of building and applying legal taxonomies to suit the breadth and depth of content they provide online. It also examined ways in which taxonomies can be surfaced in the user interface and help to drive compelling functionality that improves the user's search experience.

This talk described how taxonomy management works in practice at Clifford Chance. As an increasing number of core knowledge resources are making use of the same set of firm-wide taxonomies, the increased interdependencies necessitate the implementation of a controlled process for updating the taxonomies. A simple governance model was presented. Some thoughts followed on the evolution of taxonomy development within a larger organisation and the current challenge of using social tagging in conjunction with controlled vocabularies.

This talk gave a brief overview of current developments and prospects in two related areas of the legal semantic web for legal cases - textual information extraction and ontologies. Textual information extraction is a process of automatically annotating and extracting textual information from the legal case base (precedents), thereby identifying elements such as participants, the roles the participants play, the factors which were considered in arriving at a decision, and so on. The information is valuable not only for search (to find applicable precedents), but also to populate an ontology for legal case-based reasoning. An ontology is a formal representation of key aspects of the knowledge of legal professionals with which we can reason (e.g. given an assertion that something is a legal case, we can infer other properties) and with respect to which we can write rules (e.g. reasoning using case factors to arrive at a legal decision). Since it is expensive to manually populate an ontology (meaning to read cases and input the data into the ontology), we use textual information extraction to automatically populate the ontology. The talk was concluded with an appeal for open source, collaborative development of legal knowledge systems among partners in academia, industry, and government.

In this presentation, the speakers looked at approaches to managing legal know-how in a major global law firm. They described several boundaries that the firm had to consider when organising know-how, including boundaries between professionals, countries, internal and external resources and the well debated boundary between information and knowledge. They also shared some of the ways in which they are making know-how available to the fee earners and other professionals in the firm, using social and technological solutions.

The last decade has seen the development of a substantial number of legal know-how and knowledge databases. It has also shown up a serious question on whether the metadata, and especially the taxonomies, that are applied to the various knowledge items, should be tailored to the particular needs of end-users, or whether, so to speak, "one size can fit all". In particular, this talk discussed the overlapping, but discrete, needs of those using knowledge resources primarily for legal drafting and document production, and of those conducting legal research, and addressed the relative value today, (as opposed to in 2000), of the effort put into internal metadata creation for those two sorts of end-users.