KM: Who Knows What? (Part 1)

Reprinted from the June 2001 issue of "Lexpert, the business magazine for lawyers." Used with Permission

KM: Who Knows What? (Part 1)
by Dan C. Felean | Printer Friendly Version

The knowledge management movement has been building steam for the past few years, and "KM" has definitely arrived in Canadian law firms. For a knowledge-based industry like law, the logic of KM is irrefutable. People are the greatest asset in a professional service organization. Leveraging experience, expertise, resources and collective wisdom of the organization is what makes some law firms great (and profitable). KM processes can help the individual lawyer to do better work, strengthen the organization's intellectual assets, and improve client value.

But just because the goals of knowledge management are clear, that doesn't mean the approach and methodology to achieve those goals should be the same. Getting people to share knowledge is not an exact science, especially in the hectic, competitive, client-driven practice of law. Cultural problems are the most frequent cause of KM project failure. So, to effectively integrate KM concepts in the business processes, each firm must select the tactics and strategies that suit its logistics and help change its collective personality and culture.

Real Experiences
What are the practical methods and processes that law firms are using to facilitate the exchange of knowledge in their daily operations? I recently interviewed representatives from more than a dozen firms from the Lexpert 30 Largest Law Firms in Canada league table to take a look at the current trends and directions. Their experiences are representative of how leading Canadian firms are approaching KM issues.

By definition these firms have a large and diverse group of professionals often spread across multiple offices. Most have undergone rapid growth through mergers, branching, or lateral hires. All have committed serious resources to building a cohesive team that shares experience, skills and resources in varying degrees. Building KM processes to overcome these obstacles requires creativity, sensitivity and innovation. So, what works for them can be useful to all.

There are many theories (and some misconceptions) about the best way to approach knowledge management in law firms. KM can involve the creation of overlapping, reinforcing processes and systems. The processes can make use of technology or not, and the "systems" can be manual and behavioral, as well as technological.

In this two-part series, we are going to take a look at a deceptively simple and fundamental law firm knowledge management challenge, the person-to-person exchange of knowledge. This month we will look at how a firm can facilitate the finding of experts through people-to-people processes. Next month, we will look at the role of technology and "systems" in devising an effective expert leveraging KM process.

People Who Need People
How does one lawyer facing an unfamiliar issue or needing assistance find someone knowledgeable within the organization who can help him? What processes can help one lawyer find another who has the expertise, experience or skills to make the work more efficient or achieve a better result? This is often referred to as an expertise locator or a "who-knows-what" process.

Talking to a fellow lawyer is the most natural "knowledge-transfer" process. One-on-one, you can freely exchange ideas, discuss an approach, get some pointers, debate a process or even find document precedents explained by the author. Since the source of experience and expertise is sitting right in front of you, the context of knowledge is self-evident, and you can personally validate competency without resort to external systems. That's why a person-to-person discussion remains the least complicated and the most effective method of knowledge transfer.

Of course, finding the right expert is the real challenge. Ideally, if every firm were able to have weekly firmwide meetings like they always had on L.A. Law, there would be little problem finding experts. However, once a firm or law department grows beyond a few lawyers or expands beyond one office, the process becomes more complex.

Signposts
The starting point for identifying expertise can come from the organizational structure of the firm or law department. Clear signposts, such as departments, practice groups and teams, become an obvious point of reference to locate people with experience and expertise in a broad area of law. Large firms require multiple departments or groups for practice management, as well as knowledge management purposes.

There are varying degrees of formality and participation within these groups. In some firms, practice groups must meet regularly, while in others they only "try" to. Many firms allow lawyers to be members of multiple groups, while others find it advantageous to limit an individual's focus to one group. Most firms encourage "cross-group pollination" by allowing members of one group to attend and present expertise to other groups. While each group has a designated leader, some have augmented the structure by designating assistants or administrators to organize information; some publish internal newsletters; and some establish specialty practice area forums on their Intranet. A few firms have gone further to create cross-disciplinary practice teams, industry sector teams or communities of interest.

These organizational signposts are a good way to take care of the obvious expertise routing situations. However, they are sometimes insufficient for locating specific issue expertise, and they require great effort to sustain, especially when groups span across multiple offices.

Institutional Memory
Another important source of expertise location is a group of people that can be called "Expertise Traffic Guides" since they work at the intersection of expert activity. In particular, research lawyers and librarians gather and accumulate a great stockpile of knowledge about other lawyers in the firm from daily encounters. Other traffic guides can be found in professional development directors, knowledge managers, mentors or professional staff who have been with the organization for several years. These traffic guides represent the institutional memory of the organization.

By recollection or record-keeping, these professionals will usually be able to tell who would be the most likely to know about a particular issue or which lawyer might possess a particular skill. The beauty of this KM process is that it is a completely natural accumulation of knowledge, acquired and renewed daily without extraordinary effort or infrastructure. Moreover, they purposely maintain an air of neutrality that is not judgmental or threatening to other practitioners. Most firms now recognize that this accumulated knowledge in the organization is irreplaceable. Of course, that is also the shortcoming. People eventually leave, and it may take years to develop new guides.

Circulation: People-To-People Processes
No matter how systematically a firm attempts to catalogue expertise, it is impossible to replace the random access to valuable information and experience that comes from conversation and interaction between professionals. You may be able to find the year your colleague was called to the bar, but you may not know about his past jobs, hobbies, non-professional affiliations or even best friends that could advance a transaction or save research and effort. That's why putting professionals in the same room for meetings, receptions, retreats or social gatherings can have its own KM effect.

Of course, the advantages are less apparent when the meetings are unstructured, and the potential of KM can be negated if people do not mingle. Yet, to their credit, large law firms are strongly committed to promoting interaction. Most have made a serious financial commitment to cross-office interaction through firm events, regular scheduled travel and video-conferencing. Others have end-of-the-day partner get-togethers on a regular basis. It only takes a few cross-marketing opportunities or new business referrals to provide the payback to the individuals and the organization.

Technology Can Amplify People Processes
Busy lawyers cannot always take time to attend meetings and conferences. Technology can play an important role in supplementing or amplifying the expert-finding process. It can facilitate communication, with video conferencing and e-mail, and it can capture information in databases for use by others.

It is not surprising that e-mail has become one of the main tools to supplement the who-knows-what process. E-Mail is the one technology that lawyers have universally adopted. Internal e-mail sent firmwide or targeted to a particular practice group or team becomes the virtual "call down the hallway" for help. Delivery of the request is assured, whether the recipients are in the office or away. The means of communication are convenient and accessible by both the person needing help and the person responding. Further, it creates an electronic trail of knowledge. At least one firm has established an innovative process to review and catalogue e-mail expertise questions and answers in a knowledge database for reference by others.

However, the advantages of e-mail also contribute to its faults. Not everyone is willing to broadcast a lack of knowledge. E-mail directed to peers, superiors or juniors lacks anonymity, and could potentially be circulated to others. It could also create a glut of inquiries, although most firms acknowledged that juniors are discouraged from spamming the partners. Finally, the most knowledgeable people are often too busy to respond. For this reason, e-mail seems to be used most effectively to locate pieces of information, not sources of expertise.

People First, Aided By Technology
Too often, knowledge management projects fail due to an over-reliance on technology to solve the strategic and cultural KM issues. As these firms demonstrate, an effective KM process starts first with creating the processes and systems that allow and encourage people to share knowledge with others, one-on-one. Organizational and behavioral change is the hardest part. The processes have to respect the needs of the individual and build natural connections to other sources of knowledge within the firm.

Technology can play an important role by improving the means in which information is collected, organized and accessed by others, but only if technology is implemented in support of a broader KM process.

In Part Two we will look at how technology can supplement the KM process through use of a databases, Intranet practice group forums and passive expertise-gathering systems.

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.