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| 03.03.05
Creating An Environment In Law Firms Where Knowledge Management Will Work
 By Mitchell Dubin
The adoption of collaborative applications and knowledge management technologies by the legal profession has proceeded far less rapidly than many people would have expected or hoped.
While vendors of data mining, knowledge management and other information technologies consistently see the legal profession as a fertile market for their products and initiatives, they are often disappointed by the resistance they find by lawyers and law firms. Why have advanced and sophisticated information techniques made so little impact on the information-intensive legal profession? What can be done to open up the legal market? In spite of the general climate of resistance, what projects are good candidates for these techniques?
There is certain inevitability to the entry of knowledge management and artificial intelligence approaches in the legal profession, whether the push comes from within the profession or from external pressures from clients and competitors. This paper will discuss some of the needs that law firms want to address with artificial intelligence and knowledge management projects, the resistance barriers in law firms, and then move on to list some attractive target areas for these approaches and factors that will contribute to success of these types of projects.
 1. Needs Law Firms Seek to Address.
As part of an information intensive profession, lawyers and law firms create, use and store vast amounts of information in connection with their work. This information has a recognized value because it holds experience and expertise learned and maintained by legal organizations. Too often, however, the transfer of this knowledge inside or outside the firm occurs by happenstance or through one-on-one conversations without a sharing of information by all who need the information. Law firms want to tap into the value of their information in systematic and effective ways.
A. Not Reinventing the Wheel. To a surprising extent, in many law firms research is often duplicated, and agreements and other documents are created from scratch when models for such agreements already exist. The concern is not just inefficiency but also the inability to take advantage of best practices and current information and to make proper assignments to people with appropriate experience. With varying degrees of success, all firms have made efforts to implement techniques such as brief banks, standardized forms, training manual and documentation of procedures. Document assembly is one example of a technology used to capture prior efforts and to standardize best practices.
B. Knowledge Transfer and Mentoring. It is highly desirable to transfer the knowledge and even wisdom of older attorneys down to younger attorneys. In many cases, older attorneys may leave a firm or even die without the knowledge and other benefits of their experience being captured in a usable fashion. Not only is there a loss of substantive practice knowledge, but far too often there is the loss of the history and stories of a firm culture. There is a growing recognition of how much information is carried by way of story-telling. Core knowledge about a firm and its practices are encoded in its "myths and legends." Where transfer of this experience and expertise is not encouraged and facilitated, the knowledge of important historical details, such as how difficult management, ethical and other situations were handled, is no longer available for later generations of the firm. The transmission of core values and wisdom is either hindered or does not occur. Increasingly, law firms are recognizing the value of this loss and emphasizing the role of senior attorneys must play in mentoring other attorneys.
C. Efficient Delivery of Legal Services. Attorneys arguably work many more hours than other "knowledge workers." There is often a question of whether attorneys are simply working harder rather than working smarter. Both attorneys and clients see the benefits of more efficient delivery of legal services. Attorneys are increasingly aware of productivity gains achieved in other businesses by use of technology and find that their clients who have achieved such gains through the use of technology are pressuring law firms to adopt the same approaches. In other cases, business clients expect law firms to have certain technologies in place and are not willing to pay lawyers to deliver work in what is seen as inefficient and expensive ways.
D. Information Overload. Attorneys are inundated with paper, e-mail, advance sheets, journals, newsletters, web pages and a rising tide of information falling over them. Keeping up with developments in a practice area can take a substantial amount of time. As attorneys take advantage of e-mail newsletters, e-mail discussion lists, and other Internet resources, the symptoms of information overload can become very apparent. The need to organize, process and store in a retrievable fashion relevant information has become increasingly important.
E. Employee Retention. The new generation of lawyers leaving law school has been raised in an era of computers. Soon we will have a generation of law students who have never known a time when the Internet was not available. The level of expectations and reliance of sophisticated approaches to information and technology of these lawyers is very high. Law firms have found and will continue to find unwillingness by these lawyers to stay at firms that do not have state-of-the-art approaches to information. Law firms realize that addressing technology concerns is an essential part of attracting and retaining the best talent.
Read the Rest of the Article.
About the Author:
I have had a dynamic 11-year career reflecting pioneering experience and record-breaking performance in the IT and MIS industries. I am currently the Director of Microsoft Solutions for OnX Enterprise Solutions a publicly traded company on the Toronto Stock Exchange. |
