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

don’t think that is the primary motivator,” he adds: a growing
number of law firms are simply recognizing that KM improves
efficiency and profitability.
“Firms doing KM have a range of motivations,” Friedmann
says, “from believing it’s the right thing to do, to managing risk
— for example, by avoiding inconsistent advice — to improving
the realization rate.” Done properly, he says, KM offers
clients lower costs, more consistent advice, faster turnaround
and better answers.
From the firms’ perspective, improved client service can
help a firm maintain or gain clients, while lawyers can benefit
from a better quality of life thanks to increased efficiency. To
that list, Matthews would add a greater degree of independence
for lawyers, as well as improved communication and collaboration
throughout the firm.
How you go about implementing KM depends on the size
and structure of your firm. Friedmann says most large U.S. firms
are doing “at least some” KM now, while many large Canadian
firms are actively developing KM initiatives. Large firms are hiring
KM specialists and teams, while small and mid-size firms are
taking more measured steps by relying on in-house expertise,
such as their librarians.
Some big U.K. law firms have developed an interesting, if
expensive, model, says Nagy: they employ professional support
lawyers who work exclusively on KM. A very large firm might
have as many as 75 or 100 of these professionals, whose job is
to reconstruct the research background of a file, write it up, and
bank it. “It’s reverse engineering,” explains Nagy, adding: “This
is extremely costly.”
It’s a model that would never fly in North America, he says.
“Here, law firms find it hard to digest the idea of having a
lawyer that doesn’t bill. The ‘big-city’ firms in the U.K. operate
on a completely different scale.”
Costs and benefits
The potential cost of building a KM program can vary tremendously,
depending on what you want KM to do for you. “If all
the lawyers in a firm used existing document management systems
to provide proper titles, document types and other metadata,
KM would not cost that much,” says Friedmann. “But
that’s a huge ‘if.’ In fact, we have to compensate for the fact
that lawyers won’t do this. So most firms end up spending for
automation and/or staff to help.”
Matthews says it’s difficult to speculate about potential
costs because, essentially, the sky’s the limit. “On the high
end, law firms can integrate their software systems, build portal
integrations, and build staffing to respond to KM needs on
demand,” he says.
“On a smaller scale, a basic KM system may simply be a
working collection maintained in a Word document by a
lawyer or staff member. Is this optimal? Not by a long shot,
but with everyone on the same page and a very small group,
it can work.”
The potential price tag for KM is a function not only of
firm size, but also of the type of knowledge the firm is hoping
to manage. “For a long time, firms focused on precedents
and forms; that is, vetted and clearly reusable documents,”
says Friedmann.
“That is quite expensive, because it requires lawyer review.
Many firms are now evaluating automated work product
retrieval systems — that is, using software that finds useful
work product without lawyers doing anything extra.”
Recently, however, Friedmann says he’s seen a shift in
Karen Bell
Knowledge management consultant, Toronto
“Lawyers are concerned about sharing clients.
There are quality issues, billing issues and
issues around control of the client.”
« Les juristes ont peur de partager leur
clientèle. La qualité du travail, la facturation
et le contrôle de tout ce qui concerne le
client les préoccupent plus particulièrement. »
emphasis from documents to “experience location.” Finding a
lawyer with experience in a particular matter can be more valuable
than finding a document, because the lawyer can explain
the context, which is critical.
Methodology
To choose the right KM method, says Karen Bell, a firm should
ask itself two questions: What are we trying to do, and what
knowledge do we need in order to do that? For example, a firm
might want better management of documents, client information,
contact information, expertise monitoring, all of the
above, or something else entirely.
“For big firms, I suggest they get everyone aligned so that we
all know, okay, cross-selling is big for us this year,” says Bell. “Or
maybe it’s raising our profile in this practice area — all with a
view, of course, to profitability and more revenue. Then, parsing
36 NATIONAL
JANUARY · FEBRUARY 2006
ALENA GEDEONOVA