The Canadian Bar Association - National (English) - July/August 2012

LURENDA MASTROMONACO
Steven Matthews
Knowledge Services Director, Clark Wilson,
Vancouver
“KM is an obvious way for law firms to better serve
their clients and gain competitive advantage from
an asset they already have: their knowledge.”
« La gestion du savoir permet aux cabinets d’offrir
un meilleur service aux clients et de se démarquer
de la concurrence à partir d’un bien dont ils
disposent déjà soit leur savoir. »
JANVIER · FÉVRIER 2006 www.cba.org
Knowledge
uprising
Knowledge management is in ascendance at law
firms again, and this time, there’s no holding it
back. Recovering quickly from early setbacks, KM
is catching on at many large firms and a growing
number of boutiques. Just what is KM, and how can
it add to your firm’s efficiency, profitability and
quality of practice? The sooner you know, the less
likely you’ll be left behind.
By Patti Ryan
Like kindergarteners, they don’t always share
well. Like journalists, their work environment
is not conducive to collaboration. Like husbands,
they don’t always put an object back
where it belongs, making it hard for the next
person to know where to find it. And like Luddites, they can
be deeply skeptical of the power of new technology to do,
well, anything useful.
So what’s a law firm to do with a collection of possessive,
competitive, disorganized, technology-leery lawyers if it
wants them to buy into the power of knowledge management?
That question is now being pondered at some of the
biggest law firms in Canada.
Since the dawn of the profession, of course, lawyers have
always engaged in some form of knowledge management
(KM). Even if it was just a matter of simple verbal exchanges
at small firms, or archived precedents and research, they’ve
always had to share and manage their knowledge. In that
sense, there’s nothing new about it.
But KM as it’s understood today has come to mean the formal,
technology-based process by which knowledge can be
shared and leveraged among colleagues, sometimes across
great geographic distances. It usually calls for the creation of
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