Kol Bogrei rambam - Maimonides School

June 2011 ~ Iyar–Sivan 5771Page of 4Kol BogreiRambamConnecting Maimonides Alumni WorldwideMaimonides Experience Started Alumna on Track to an Unusual ProfessionAyelette Robinson ’91 says she has“found a career that weaves togethermy education, my skills, and my interests.And it all started at Maimonides.”Ayelette is Director of KnowledgeTechnology at Littler MendelsonP.C., a San Francisco-based law firmwith more than 800 attorneys and 50offices across the U.S.“While my title may sound unusual,my role actually grew quite organicallyout of my high school, college,and graduate school experiences,” sheexplained. “Leveraging each aspect ofmy past, I lead the technology-basedknowledge management efforts atmy law firm.”“Throughout my Maimonides career(14 years, counting pre-kindergartenand kindergarten), my favorite courseswere math, science, and Talmud,” shesaid. “I preferred the straightforward,logical analysis skills necessary forthese over what seemed to me to beamorphous thought processes leveragedfor the humanities. So whenI was applying to college, medicalschool—a strong career path forsomeone who enjoyed science—seemed like a good direction.”Ayelette was accepted into BrownUniversity’s Program in LiberalMedical Education (PLME), throughwhich undergraduates are allowed tocontinue directly into Brown’s medicalschool following graduation, withouthaving to go through the painfulmedical school application process.“This is truly an amazing programfor someone wishing to becomea doctor, but in the middle of myundergraduate years, I realized thatwhile the sciences still intrigued me,I did not have enough passion formedicine to sustain me through themany long years, and nights, requiredfor a full medical education,” Ayelettereflected.So after graduating from college,she spent the next few years “tryingto figure out what I wanted to do. Iheld a few different positions in a fewdifferent industries. Perhaps the mostrandom, but also randomly useful,was my work at a Japanese bookstorewhich at the time had a streetpresence in Cambridge, but whichalso had (and still has) has an onlinepresence.”Among her responsibilities wasmaintaining and expanding thestore’s website. “I had no websitedevelopment experience at all, butthe previous administrator was kindenough to show me the ropes, teachme basic HTML and Java and directme to some helpful books, and thestore owner was kind enough tolet me experiment with the site as Ilearned,” she said.Ultimately, Ayelette decided on lawschool, and worked as a paralegal fora year while applying. After graduatingfrom University of MichiganLaw School, she chose to become acorporate associate and moved toSan Francisco, practicing there andin Silicon Valley. “I had occasion tooverlap with technology and scienceduring my practice, and, reminiscingmy roots, found those interactionsfun and interesting,” she recounted.“But even as I began to explore careeralternatives to law firm partner, I neveractively pursued a return to thoseroots. Instead I investigated careerpaths that would continue to leveragemy law school and law practiceexperience.”“I eventually found a great match, aprofessional development opportunityat another law firm that was partof a large group of prior practicingattorneys, making the camaraderieand skill set of this group unsurpassed.The firm also happened tohave a knowledge managementinitiative well under way at the time,and the leader of that initiative (anIsraeli lawyer) worked closely with theprofessional development group.”“So, while I had never heard of ‘knowledgemanagement’ before, I had animmediate, though completely coincidental,chance to participate in thoseprojects. And it was love at first sight.”Knowledgemanagement,Ayeletteexplained, is “theeffort to bridgethe gap betweenpeople and theinformation theyneed. Think ofyour life with andwithout Google:while GoogleAyelette Robinson ‘91does not own ormanage any ofthe information you find by using it,you are able to access that informationmuch more easily with Googlethan without it.”“For me,” she continued, “a career inlegal knowledge management wastruly the perfect match: my experienceas a lawyer is indispensable forunderstanding the kinds of informationattorneys need in order to practicebetter, and my interest and skillset in technology allow me to communicateequally well with the lawyersand with the technologists involvedin each initiative, and to translatesuccessfully between the twogroups—those who need the system,and those who are building it. “