KNOMOS FEATURES

Knomos is a product aimed at knowledge workers in the legal field.

Now, when one of them sits at a desk, the first thought is usually "what do I have to do first?". Coincidentally, this is also the first question of any user faced with newly installed software.

Thus, Knomos is firstly centered on personal and shared agendas, in the broadest, etymological sense of the word. Records of pertinent entries are split in two categories:

that called "tasks", i.e., steps, errands and projects to be completed within a given time limit, and which are usually scheduled with a significant advance, and are normally dealt with according to their priority, or otherwise on a "first-in, first-out" basis;
and that called "events", which are schedule items which one must perform or attend at a specific moment (say, a meeting, which may be cancelled or postponed, but cannot be attended as such either before or after its time).

The relevant entries are recorded by the user through reference to the appropriate time and to an identification code, which allows the user to avoid typing in manually the item definition (which can however be edited) and assist in the normalisation of its wording organisation-wide. Notes in free form can be freely added as necessary - as can be the indication of any additional personnel involved, supervisor(s), reviewers, or group(s) thereof, if the user has the right to do so in respect to the other
individuals concerned.

Each agenda entry is connected to a given matter or project. A given matter, and the file pertaining to it, are the second fundamental metaphor used by Knomos. A matter can be any instruction or request from a final client, or any legal proceedings, sub-proceedings within existing proceedings, negotiation, advice or other assignment to the organisation making use of Knomos or one of its members, including, say, professional updating activities or specific administrative tasks. It is part of Knomos philosophy that such units should be split in the smallest fractions which may have a meaning in terms of project management, so that, for instance, the negotiation for the settlement of a dispute should probably be dealt with as a separate matter from any related judicial procedure, the enforcement of a judgment from the previous trial, and so forth.

The record of each "file" pertaining to a given matter identifies the client (which can obviously be the organisation itself or one of its department) and in general the parties thereto, the sum the matter is worth, the venue of the proceedings if applicable, the subject matter, the kind of work or area of law concerned, plus possibly references to the account manager, the originating office, the originating attorney, the partner responsible for the project completion or the lead counsel, etc.

In turn, each matter is linked:

to the relevant to-do list (including all and only the "events" and "tasks", in the sense defined above, that are pertinent to the matter),
to the personal data, profiles and contact details of the parties involved - from the client(s) and beneficiary(ies), to other parties, experts, correspondents, opposing counsel, etc.;
to the documents (both generated internally and other);
and of course, to the records of the steps and activities already undertaken, if any, in the performance of the necessary work.

Such steps can be recorded independently, but in most cases the relevant records are generated simply by checking the entries agenda as completed. The relevant records not only contain (or inherit from an agenda entry) the time and description of the activities performed, and the identity of the person having performed them, and again any free-form notes which can be appropriate in the circumstances, but the out-of-pocket and other costs possibly occurred or anticipated in the name of the client, and the time spent. This allows the program to be used as a timesheet, and to calculate the fees generated on the basis of a range of hourly rates (per fee-earners, per client, per matter, etc.) and the fees generated by user-definable tariff systems, as the (preloaded) Italian National Lawyers Tariff, for statistical and billing purposes - and for the automated drafting of fee notes to courts and arbitrators in the framework of proceedings where costs are awarded to the winning party on the basis of an analitical tariff system. All those virtual fee figures are stored and saved separately from those made applicable for actual billing, so that they can be used for statistical, performance, and projection analyses, irrespective of real accounting figures, which may have to take into account non-billable work, bad debts, pro-bono activities and special arrangements or circumstances.

The documents pertaining to a given matter can be "imported" in the matter file from any source (say, a scanned deed and/or its OCR-ed version, pictures, videos, incoming e-mail messages, computer files generated by any application and in any format, legal researches, hypertexts, whole databases, etc.). Alternatively, they can, normally in the completion of a "task" to this effect, be generated by Knomos itself - possibly on the basis of existing forms, in such case after filling them automatically whenever possible with the appropriate data, if available - for further editing and/or subsequent delivery on paper or electronic form.

A log of all transactions performed by Knomos and its registered users on the databases is maintained in a separate database, which can be exported for offline storage periodically.

Subject to the existence of appropriate user privileges, each user can hence make use of the documents and other data contained in Knomos, together with its sophisticated research tools, as a knowledge basis, which is incrementally developed and updated with time by the whole users' pool of a given Knomos setup. Similarly, firm and department managers and group coordinators can make use of its log and group scheduling features for project and workflow management, performance checking and auditing, and basic ERP supervision.

Moroever, the very nature of Knomos, and of its finely grained security and access-control management, makes it possible for a given organisation to share, extranet-style, some of its data with other parties, granting for instance a read-only access to a given client to the records of the steps performed or to be performed in the framework of a given instruction, and/or to the documents pertaining to the same, or allowing another firm or an external counsel to work on a number of shared documents.

Needless to say, there is much more to Knomos that is practical to describe here. For further details, please see the Knomos Documentation, the application itself, and the best-use practices discussed in Knomos Forums.