NEW ENTRANTS to legal knowledge management (KM) join an area that has become established during a time of great technological and economic change, which continues apace. Early adopters are moving into another generation of investment in capturing and organising institutional experience and individual know-how to drive and support efficiency, quality and service. How much have the core legal KM objectives been achieved to date? Which issues have arisen or changed over time? What challenges remain? A focus on some key areas will assist the debate.

Establishing a know-how culture

A staple of legal KM job descriptions and conference programmes, new entrants and old hands alike will recognise the challenge to establish a know-how culture.  A culture where contributions to know-how are willingly and timeously offered, and where knowledge management resources are naturally consulted, is a KM holy grail.  Sticks and carrots, getting buy-in from the top (“lead by example”) and focusing on the juniors (“get them early”): variations of these will be familiar to every knowledge manager. 

Those firms where participation in KM is non-negotiable, enforced by well-defined and supported workflows, appear to have the upper-hand, at least in achieving the mechanics and appearance of a know-how culture. In less structured environments, where altruism and enthusiasm are more critical KM elements, while a know-how culture may be considered no less important, its achievement may be a subject of constant negotiation and initiative by knowledge managers.

Lawyers are no more embedded now with an understanding of the value of knowledge management, and the importance of their individual role in it, than they were previously: it is for the individual firm and its knowledge managers to instill and maintain that, and it is a continuous process. Knowledge managers are the keystone of any current know-how culture: take them away and it will quickly crumble.

Professional support as a career

The early presence of knowledge management in law firms was almost exclusively in the form of professional support lawyers (PSLs), usually lawyers who moved away from the frontline into a supporting role. Debate followed about job titles, career structure and, indeed, whether the role was sustainable. It was several years later that knowledge management appeared as a discipline in law firms, attracting non-lawyer KM professionals and bringing knowledge management teams. 

A knowledge management career in the legal profession now offers scope to practise and develop skills beyond those as a client-facing lawyer. It offers a diversity of roles and opportunities to join senior management, branch into other disciplines and/or move into legal KM outside private practice. I have known very few people over the years who have reversed their decision to move from frontline law into knowledge management, but any requirement to do so because legal KM is not recognised as a serious and valued role is a distant memory. That is not to say that knowledge managers now have it easy. Today’s KM teams require more investment and strategic consideration than the often more practice-focused and ad hoc early PSL roles, and a KM team’s value to lawyers (its clients) can be more remote and tacit. A focus on demonstrating value, and staying close to the business, is therefore essential.

Aligning KM with other support functions

The correlation between knowledge management and risk management was identified early on in the arrival of KM in law firms. Supporting the timely delivery of good quality and up-to-date advice and documentation is at the core of both KM and risk regulation, and lawyers who have moved into KM often demonstrate the diligence and tenacity required for establishing and delivering effective risk-management procedures. 

The close connections between KM and business development is also something that was quickly evident. The matters our lawyers are working on, and the experience they develop, are the lifeblood of core KM and business development functions, and research notes and training presentations prepared for internal knowledge sharing have a second life when turned to be client-facing (and vice versa). Steps to merge the two departments have not been widespread, but a “best friends” status has often emerged and should be fostered.

Legal training and professional development is another area that has travelled with KM, often alongside, for much of its development journey to date. The trend now appears to be to combine the two, at least at the highest strategic and management level, and the synergies are certainly evident. At the very least a close relationship – another “best friend” for KM – is essential to ensure that knowledge management resources are integral to training and development programmes and that experience and know-how shared in training are captured for future reference by KM.

What about the library? Early impressions that PSLs and knowledge management tools would replace the traditional legal librarian role proved incorrect: the advanced research skills of the most able librarians are more than a match – and an essential accompaniment – for any PSL. The library’s role in delivering research and information services has, however, often seen it placed underneath the KM umbrella, with differing degrees of retaining its own identity.

Knowledge management has developed as a function in its own right, sometimes subsuming others but rarely being subsumed itself. 

Client-facing know-how

Early adopters of KM made template documents and guidance notes (prepared for internal use) available to some clients and debated the impact of “giving away the crown jewels”. The delivery of know-how and KM services to clients has moved on considerably. Making content available to clients is not now sufficient; it must be tailored to the client and delivered in their preferred platform. As clients have themselves embraced the value of knowledge management, the opportunity has arisen for law firm knowledge managers to assist clients directly on such projects, sometimes by formal secondment. In pitches for new business, where details of value-added services have become a common requirement, KM must present an appealing array of resources and services available to clients. 

Does the provision of client-facing KM services prejudice the original mandate to prepare and manage know-how for internal use? In some cases I think it does, and KM teams offering know-how services to clients must be resourced appropriately to ensure they can also deliver the essentials to their internal clients. Clients may be impressed by a menu of value-added services, but that will not displace their expectation for high quality, timely, commercial and accurate advice, which is legal KM’s primary responsibility to support.

Technology

Version 1.0 of a legal know-how collection was an impressive display of hard copy folders, dazzling in their alphabetical and colour-coded glory. Knowledge management was easier back then, when precedent content was prepared more slowly and explicitly documented and the knowledge manager was a physical gatekeeper of the collection.

As touch-typing became a white collar skill, enabling lawyers to prepare and edit their own documents, and with the arrival of email, the order maintained by knowledge managers was disrupted. Today’s document and email management systems, enterprise search and online know-how systems are the replacement – are they effective?  In many ways, of course, they are superior; quicker and more exhaustive. Yet often, with those tools, we are still trying to reproduce those early, simple, lawyer-friendly hard copy folders: are we giving our lawyers a speedboat when they only want, and are only ready for, a canoe?

Of course we must not dismiss the enabling capacity of the technology now available to us. We can deliver more personalized and dynamic information to our users, increasingly to the device of their choice, and in simplified app or full desktop version. Enterprise search can find that needle in the haystack. Our lawyers can blog their latest know-how nugget, followed and liked all the way.

But we have a long way to go. Technology vendors need to be more lawyer-focused, so that the ease with which we transact online in our personal lives is replicated in the law firm. We were expecting our lawyers to become more technology-friendly – the arrival of Generation Y was much-heralded – but that simply has not happened.  Even the most tech-savvy lawyers, whatever the generation, will find some of the current legal knowledge technologies hard work, and that must change. 

Conclusion

Legal KM to date has brought us a lot of experience – particularly in knowing that there is no magic bullet – but the core issues remain. New entrants and early adopters alike are still striving to capture valuable know-how and configure it in a way that will be useful to – and used by – their clients. In some cases the clients have varied, becoming external as well as internal. Technology has moved the goalposts and offers functions and power that still need to be harnessed fully to truly serve the legal profession. The skill sets and constituents of the KM team have varied and increased. It is an exciting time to be in KM: there is a lot of work to do.

By Claire Andrews, Director of Knowledge Management (Europe and Asia), Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton