Date: April 12, 2013 Topic: The Shrinking ... - Georgetown Law

H2: Wider document download patterns (involving a larger number of unique partners)
will increase a manager’s subsequent value creation.
Although more document downloading may increase value creation in general, our
arguments above about the social view of technology suggest that the results may depend on preexisting
social ties between the users and producers of knowledge accessed through the KMS.
For complex knowledge, such as that found in legal services, it may be difficult to effectively
understand another person’s prior experiences reflected in their downloaded documents. Prior
social relations with the knowledge provider can help to clarify the meaning of the document and
how that knowledge can be applied in other cases. As mentioned earlier in our case study, reuse
of documents with which one is not familiar can easily lead to mistakes and be confusing for
clients, leading to conflict and client dissatisfaction. Similarly, without prior social relations an
individual’s attempt to use different people’s documents may be fraught, and not lead to any
clear improvement in client services. In this case the search and efforts around it become wasted
time that negatively impact on ability to generate client revenue. Hence without any social ties,
technology based search appears more likely to lead to a “dead end” or to knowledge misuse,
reducing the value created.
H3: Downloading documents from directly-tied partners will increase a manager’s
subsequent value creation more so than downloading documents from non-tied providers.
Going deeper into knowledge use when social ties exist, we can consider two types of
connections between user and provider of knowledge: they could share either indirect ties, if they
work with common colleagues (but not each other), or they could share direct ties, if they
actually already work together on projects. Research in social networks suggests that indirect ties,
which are often called “weak ties,” have greater benefits for individuals because they are more
likely to provide new and non-redundant useful information to the focal person. In contrast,
direct or “strong” ties are more likely to provide information to the focal person that he or she
already knows and which is therefore of less value (Granovetter 1973). Hence we argue that
indirect tie-based document use should provide the optimal context for value creation because
knowledge originating in this social context is most likely to be novel and actionable.
H4: Downloading documents from indirectly-tied partners will increase a manager’s
subsequent value creation more so than downloading documents from directly-tied
partners.
METHODS
Qualitative data
Data collection for this project took place between 2005 and 2010. For our quantitative
analysis, we obtained access to the log file of the KMS for the period 2005-2010. In addition, we
were granted access to billable and non-billable hours information, for each member of the firm,
from 1999 to 2010, and to reports prepared in the context of individual yearly performance
evaluations, which showed who had worked with whom (and for what volume of hours) from
1999 to 2010, with the exception of 2007 1 . We immediately anonymized all files received.
1 The files showing who had worked with whom, in 2007, were corrupted and unusable.
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