Knowledge is power. And the legal profession – despite being slow to adopt knowledge management – is ideally positioned to use it, writes Marc ter Kuile
Knowledge is power. This phrase grows ever more resonant as access to knowledge grows easier and cheaper. Yet recognising where to find the most useful sources of knowledge grows ever harder. In its simplest form, Knowledge Management (KM) is a means of directing individuals towards useful knowledge, of sharing knowledge between members of a team or a company. As Peter Gottschalk writes in the Journal of Information, Law and Technology: ‘KM helps companies create, share and use knowledge effectively.
Effective KM pays off in fewer mistakes, less redundancy, quicker problem solving, better decision-making, reduced research development costs, increased worker independence, enhanced customer relations and improved service.’
This is a very impressive list. Yet it has only been in the past few years that law firms have become fully aware of the benefits of KM. Management consultancies were quicker off the mark, introducing KM first for their own internal use, then as a product that they could sell to their clients. There are now dozens of executives in government and in Fortune 500 firms who hold titles such as chief knowledge officer. There are journals and trade publications devoted to KM and some universities now have KM programmes. A new genre is with us.
The legal profession, despite being slower to adopt the discipline, is ideally positioned to use KM. A law firm can, for example, quickly identify people who have worked with specific clients or in specific areas of the law, in order to put together a team. KM can be a distinctive and durable source of competitive advantage, helping to reshape a firm’s culture to become more creative, client-focused, efficient, better skilled and better connected.
KM does not have to be exclusively IT-based, but the reality is that the internet, and company intranets, are the single most powerful means of achieving effective KM. Intranets can become enormously powerful shared memories and databanks, allowing collaboration across countries and continents. Some law firms have even approached us to include our service on their extranets.
Law firms are, by their nature, knowledge intensive. And so the use of advanced technology is going to transform them over time. Legal professionals are well aware of the profound and dramatic transformations going on under their noses.
This shift of resources, from having highly labour intensive processes to a system where legal professionals can concentrate more on their clients, has clearly been welcomed by the profession.
Yet KM has a number of downsides. Indeed, firms can concentrate too much on dealing with clients (thereby maximising billable time) to the detriment of KM and the company as a whole. Many in the KM field argue that, by spending time developing a genuinely efficient KM system, firms can create more profit at lower billing rates, leading to new and returning clients.
Gottschalk quotes a long list of KM pitfalls, including ‘not developing a working definition of knowledge’, ‘downplaying thinking and reasoning’ and ‘substituting technical contact for human interface’. These points stress the need to treat KM as a flexible management tool, rather than a rigid piece of software. KM that results in a more playful and creative work climate attracts and retains the best and brightest employees. So KM is about far more than IT; rather, it is a mindset, a protocol.
Professional support lawyers have a particular interest in KM. Their job involves a different skill set to practising lawyers, being more about extracting and recycling information. Using KM technology leads to the prospect of increased remote working, where firms can move to a wireless, or non-office-based form of access.
Giving all members of a firm access to the most up-to-date, accurate and extensive information possible, wherever they are, is certainly an ambition for the medium term, as wireless technology opens up new and more powerful lines of communication. KM has a fundamental role to play in this movement.
Connecting with complementary sources of knowledge is another vital step for the future, especially in the legal profession. Accessing data from around the world, for comparative studies for example, has been made possible through the internet, yet here again, finding exactly what you are after is not always easy. We have all gasped when faced with 178 million sites that match our search criteria.
There is certainly further to go, since many lawyers are only beginning to understand the full implications of KM.
Nevertheless, the vastly increased information traffic, through the development of e-mail, has made the development of effective KM tools a necessity.
Of course, not every law firm has embraced the IT revolution to its fullest extent. Some argue that the legal profession has been particularly slow to recognise the advantages and efficiencies that IT and KM present. Yet most commentators agree that the profession has more to gain than almost any other sector, since knowledge is so central: knowledge is the lawyer’s currency.
Marc ter Kuile is president of europrospectus.com, which provides online knowledge management systems to lawyers and capital markets professionals.
