Hiring More People?
Traditionally, lawyers obtain leverage simply by hiring more junior people to do more work at lower cost. But, hiring, training and retaining quality people is expensive. Ironically, the astronomical increase in starting associate salaries usually results in "negative leverage," with partners working more to pay for the promising, but as yet not fully productive, young lawyers.

Record rates of associate turnover are making it increasingly harder to leverage new blood. According to the National Law Journal's survey of the largest 250 law firms in the US, an average of 18.5 per cent of associates left their firms for other work in 1999. A partner in a large New York firm recently told me that with his firm's current rate of attrition, 40 per cent of the associates are in transition (20 per cent outgoing, 20 per cent incoming). At that level, it is an effort to achieve continuity, let alone leverage.

To keep pace with increasing expectations, lawyers need to develop better means to leverage time, resources and expertise. That is why technology must take a more prominent role, both for the individual lawyer and the organization.

Technology As A Lever For Individuals
Technology has the potential to become the most powerful instrument for leverage. It has already proven valuable to leverage lawyer time (cell phones, e-mail, pagers), to increase overall productivity (billing production systems), and to leverage some expertise (document management and research systems). Most of these gains were achieved by installing enterprise-centric systems with little involvement of the professional. More important gains are yet to come when the professional leverages knowledge.

To achieve the full potential of knowledge leverage, the next wave of technology has to address the needs of the worker first, while co-benefiting the organization at the same time. If technology can provide a means for a lawyer to do more, work smarter and appear to be in two or more places at the same time, the lawyer, client and the law firm will co-benefit.

Knowledge Funnelling
That is where the concept of "Knowledge Funnelling" comes in. Knowledge Funnelling recognizes that the best time and place to gather and leverage information is when and where work is being done. It creates an environment where information can be gathered and exchanged naturally while performing daily business activities. It assists the individual to do better work while leveraging the resources of the collective organization for the benefit of each individual lawyer. Both the lawyer and organization can co-benefit from better work product, more innovation, more profit, more productivity, and higher retention of associates.

Knowledge Funnelling is not a specific product or system. But, there are fundamental principles that can be incorporated within key business processes. They are as follows:

1. The technology has to consider the lawyer and work process. Empowering a lawyer means giving him or her the tools to leverage time, expertise and resources for individual benefit. To accomplish this, the organization must take the time to understand what the lawyer needs to do a job more efficiently. As Bill Jensen, the author of Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster puts it, an organization needs to find ways to help its employees work smarter by "working backwards from what people need to do their work." In most law firms, there are many redundant lists and databases of information that lawyers and their secretaries have created to help them do their work better, quicker, and more accurately. Knowledge Funnelling means "going to the source" to incorporate this information and reduce duplication of effort without violating privacy or control.

2. The technology must provide for inter-applicability of information. In other words, when you do one thing, you can contribute to many. Do not ask a time-pressured lawyer to impart the same or related information in two or more places just to accommodate incompatible enterprise systems. For example, most case management and business development systems do not live up to their potential because they require the lawyer to spend extra time entering case or contact notes in a separate system. These systems add tasks and do little to help the professional leverage time.

   With a Knowledge Funnelling approach, the lawyer should be able to access and enter a billing entry, a case note, or a business contact note as part of one integrated information-entry process. Again, the goal of Knowledge Funnelling is to facilitate the collection of useful internal client information (in effect "knowledge management") by making it part of the regular daily time recording activity. Related information should be entered at the same time while it is fresh in the mind of the lawyer.

3. The technology should provide a simple, predictable way of doing things. Complex work requires simple tools. Not all technology is simple, but the lawyer does not have to be exposed to the complexities of the underlying systems to participate in the Kowledge Funnelling process. To best leverage information or expertise, the lawyer should feel comfortable with one simple way to access and contribute. For starters, some firms are standardizing on a browser interface to provide lawyers with simple access to internal information.

   A good example is a work product database, a useful source of leveraging expertise. Most brief banks and precedent databases are hopelessly out of date and underutilized. These systems require a second, separate effort to submit and categorize the documents. Even with the best intentions most lawyers will rarely contribute to them. Knowledge Funnelling recognizes that the best time to decide whether the document would make a useful precedent is when a lawyer is actually drafting or reviewing it. The lawyer should be able to send it to the precedents editor with a click of the mouse.

   The most important aspect of leveraging expertise is in the selection of a useful precedent (lawyer brain power). The process of sending it to the precedents editor should be effortless. Checking citations, key-word tagging and publishing are labour-intensive, behind-the-scenes tasks better delegated to professional staff - all for better leverage.

4. Technology must provide access to global (firmwide) information as easily and reliably as personal information (and vice-versa). The World Wide Web and personal information devices (Palm, Black Berry, digital phones) are setting new standards for ease of access and use of personal information. These devices also create higher expectations of enterprise information and systems. Unless the organization's technology can offer equivalent ease of access, lawyers will not fully participate. If lawyers continue to maintain competing personal system, information cannot be funnelled and no one can benefit from leveraging.

5. The organization must respect individual privacy. Granting a lawyer control over the privacy of his/her information is fundamental to Knowledge Funnelling. This is not a question of ownership; it is a question of participation. The first step in Knowledge Funnelling is to make it easy to gather information for the individual's benefit. Information, or knowledge, can never be shared if it is scattered across several personal systems. Yet, lawyers will not consolidate their personal information in a more efficient enterprise systems if some of it cannot be kept private.

   For lawyers to fully participate, the organization must respect the lines between personal and corporate information, and empower the individual lawyer to unilaterally secure private areas of information. Knowledge sharing is not going to take hold in an organization overnight, but it will never happen if information is scattered and inaccessible by all. Accept that enterprise and individual information databases can exist separately within the same system. Respect the individual and his/her right to maintain control and privacy for some information.

6. Separate the management of information from the use of information. If the organization respects privacy, then individuals can delegate the technical, administrative and clerical tasks of building and maintaining information databases to the organization. Everyone gains from the funnelling and efficiencies of maintaining enterprise systems. Knowledge Funnelling separates the information process from technology maintenance. It encourages lawyers to contribute and benefit directly, then share where they wish, without effort. It avoids the proliferation of alternate, disparate systems with their resulting inefficiencies and "drag" on the organization.

That is not to say that Knowledge Funnelling is easy. Knowledge Funnelling is an approach to technology, not a fixed product on a shelf. It will require a major effort by the organization, and there must be a willingness to sacrifice some control to the individual to build a process that benefits both.

In turn, the process requires much more of the individual lawyer. The organization cannot implement Knowledge-Funnelling systems that are useful and relevant to lawyers without the full participation of the "consumer." This may be much harder than buying a standard-designed system. Lawyers must become active participants in building a process that suits their needs and practice. Fortunately, the whole process is designed to benefit the participant.

Since Knowledge Funnelling is tuned to the individual, it is likely that no two systems will be exactly alike. What works in one firm, may not add value to the next. However, the leverage of knowledge is where we will see the most significant differentiation between lawyers and between law firms. The adoption of strategic knowledge leveraging technology can create a significant competitive edge for active participants.

© 2000 PensEra Knowledge Technologies

Dan C. Felean a principal of PensEra Knowledge Technologies, a national consulting firm that specializes in knowledge management strategies and technologies for law firms and corporate law departments. See www.pensera.com.