client’s. On-site access to educational materials also
supports efficiency efforts, since attorneys’ billable
hours increase as their time away from the office
decreases.
PEOPLE
While all of the producers will participate in the
updating process, a dedicated, cross-functional
team is required to scope, design and implement
the knowledge management program. Connie
Crosby of Crosby Group Consulting recommends the
teams be divided into two groups, “The governance
group oversees the system in principal, and the
implementation group operationalizes it. There is a
distinction.” Stephanie Barnes of Missing Puzzle Piece
Consulting noted that, “The first group needs to have
the credibility to go back to their departments and say,
‘This is what we are doing for knowledge management
and elicit cooperation.’”
The KM team will often include the legal librarian,
members of IT and the practice support group, and
a representative from each practice area. This team
must understand the workflows of their respective
departments or practice areas in order to design a
system that will support them.
PROCESS
Knowledge Flow
People
to
Knowledge Repository
• Sharing, e.g.:
Communities of
Practice, mentoring,
expertise
location
• Knowledge artifact
creation, e.g.
People
from
Knowledge
Repository
• Learning,
e.g. on
the job training,
lessons learned,
peer assists,
searching
• Systematizing
concepts, e.g. meta
data, taxonomies
The KM process must provide for a flow of knowledge.
Figure 1, by Law Firm KM5, a legal knowledge
management assessment and coaching consultancy,
illustrates that knowledge flow. More than simply
a knowledge repository, the KM system must also
include the means to access the information and
use it to help the organization learn and mature. The
knowledge management process must inform the
business process improvement practices.
TECHNOLOGIES
Attorneys want to practice law, not knowledge
management. So the knowledge management
system must enhance the practice of law and
include knowledge sharing by default. Knowledge
management is not a technology; it is much more a
function of people and process with technology as
a supporting player. Still, technology can be used to
facilitate this flow of knowledge. The system, however,
must be designed to support the day-to-day processes
of the legal team.
ENTERPRISE SEARCH
24% of the respondents to the 2012 ILTA KM survey
said that they have implemented federated or
enterprise search. This organization-wide search
capability can be the initial foray into knowledge
management. Pointing the search engine at the
electronic information is not sufficient though.
Since many important documents are still stored in
hardcopy, for enterprise search to be truly effective,
the process must include the scanning and accurate
optical character recognition (OCR) and conversion
of scanned documents to fully text-searchable PDF.
Then, the underlying search technology must make it
easy to locate relevant information with minimal noise
(irrelevant information).
