Kate's story starts in London, England where after her law degree and postgrad, she joined a legal publishing start-up during the dot-com bubble years. Working with the complexity of legal content and metadata-enriched knowledge, she started her obsession at the intersection of technology, legal and design.
Her first search project was moving a Lotus Notes platform to a bespoke content management system with the new (as it then was) Verity search system, which became Verity K2. It needed much adaptation to make it work for the Web as well as Lawtel's metadata schema. Since then, Kate has been designing knowledge experiences in the content-rich legal sphere and ensuring findability is at the heart of every engagement.
Kate earned her Legal KM stripes in the optimistic buzz of the new century as an Information Architect at two very different but forward-thinking firms (Matrix Chambers and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer). And in 2007, Kate made the leap and set up her own Knowledge Design Consultancy advising firms in London, and then in her new home in Toronto, Canada on all things Legal KM and UX (after emigrating with her Canadian husband and English cat!).
Joining Bennett Jones in 2014, Kate is now the Chief Knowledge Officer responsible for KM, Library and Innovation at the firm.
Over her 20 years in the industry, eight law firms and six enterprise search and knowledge bank implementations, Kate remains as fascinated and passionate as ever about findability, KM and UX. The future holds much to get excited about in all three of these areas, and the intersection in particular is where you'll find Kate if you ever want to get in touch!