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

NUTS BOLTS
Okay, we know how significant knowledge management
can be, but what does it actually look like?
We asked Peter Nagy, Director of KM Practices at
Fasken Martineau DuMoulin, to take us beyond
KM theory and give us the nitty-gritty on how it
works in real life.
How a lawyer actually uses and contributes to KM will depend in
large part on which tools and software packages (if any) the firm
uses, and to which of the following business needs the firm has
decided to apply KM.
AND
1. PRECEDENTS AND RESEARCH MANAGEMENT (PRM)
“PRM is about designing tools and processes that allow lawyers to
collaborate in their day-to-day work of researching and drafting transactional
and advice-giving documents — such as contracts, memos
and opinions — and storing them as in-house legal authorities and
contextualized expertise, whether in the form of precedents, examples
or expert location,” says Nagy. PRM uses tools like memo and
contract assembly software, or project collaboration tools.
2. DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT (DM) AND DOCUMENT RETENTION
Designing the firm’s client intake process and the surface information
architecture of all documents generated in a law firm can give lawyers
ready access to work in progress, to historical documents, and to a
secondary source of in-house legal authorities and expertise, Nagy
says.
3. COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST
Firms can create virtual communication spaces by means of an
Intranet or portal, where each of the firm’s communities (such as
practice and industry groups) has its own unique forum for exchanging
ideas, says Nagy. Some firms use an Intranet to create a single
firm-wide forum for events and news, or to provide an integrated platform
for PRM tools and for searches in targeted or multiple knowledge
repositories.
4. CLIENT RELATIONS MANAGEMENT
CRM applications and practices make it easier for lawyers to strategically
share client contacts and business information, with a view to
improving client support and cross-selling.
KM will be more effective if the firm’s various information systems
can “piggyback” on each other, regardless of where they’re
located, says Nagy. “For example, databases used by the firm’s
accounting and library service groups should seamlessly feed into
the firm’s PRM system.” N
it down, it’s just a matter of what knowledge or experience you
need in order to accomplish those goals most effectively.”
The most cost-effective KM strategy, says Nagy, involves
connecting lawyers to each other and giving them the tools to
capture their exchanges easily for future reference. Lawyers will
be more likely to participate in KM if the system enables simultaneous
connectivity and capture, and ensures that the content
creators are also the content managers, he says.
Ideally, especially for North American firms, Nagy says, the
person doing the research should be capturing the knowledge
at the same time, so that — as opposed to the way things work
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in firms with professional services lawyers — the work doesn’t
have to be done twice. “The person who creates the knowledge
should also be the one who manages it,” he says.
In the North American context, research lawyers are in the
best position to do this, he adds. “Call them a research lawyer, a
knowledge manager — a duck is a duck,” he says. “It still quacks.”
Lawyer motivation
Bell thinks lawyers will get onboard if they can be convinced
that gaining access to knowledge and information will make
them more productive. But she believes compensation is
also important.
“It’s having a compensation system that recognizes people’s
contributions in a variety of ways — like by putting some
value on the fact that you serve as a mentor, or that at lunchand-learns
you share your experiences and approaches on
files, or that you write papers and speeches and go out to do
presentations,” she says. “There are so many ways to add to
KM. I think too much of the discussion focuses on contributing
to a database.”
David Hambourger, a technology partner and KM expert
with Winston & Strawn in Chicago, stresses the importance of
meeting the needs of specific groups, rather than trying to sell
the concept firm-wide. “If you treat your lawyers as monolithic,
it isn’t going to work, because they’re anything but,” he
points out.
Still, Hambourger’s approach may be less conciliatory than
some. His firm is going ahead with KM whether its lawyers love
the idea or not. “Can KM be effective without getting everyone
onside? Clearly it can,” he says.
“I wish lawyers had one opinion on this, but some agree
with it and some don’t. If you had to pick one of the hills, it’s
certainly more uphill than downhill. In some ways, we’ve
taken a different tack — not asking whether they agree or not,
but just doing it, in ways that don’t really require their active
participation.”
Return on investment?
Like everything else about KM, the notion of measuring its
return on investment (ROI) seems to stir up strong feelings.
Despite the fact that the cost of implementing KM can range
from pocket change to multiple millions of dollars, pretty
much everyone seems to agree that trying to measure ROI is
essentially fruitless.
“Skip the ROI analysis,” says Friedmann. “If you don’t
believe KM is worth doing, then just don’t do it. Why bother
trying to roll rocks uphill?” Hambourger says the same thing:
“The folks who have gone down that road have found it very
difficult,” he says.
“I’m much more focused on the soft-side benefits than on
the quantity,” Hambourger notes. “KM gets answers for clients
more quickly; it can help integrate lateral people into the firm
more quickly. One could argue whether those are quantity or
quality. I think they’re quality until you put numbers on them,
and that’s the hard part.”
For her part, Bell points out that most law firms don’t measure
ROI on anything else — so why single out KM?
“This whole focus on ROI of KM, I think, is very misplaced,”
she says. “I don’t believe anyone’s come up with a proper way
to measure it, and if they have, we can always pull it apart.
“Law firms spend big bucks on fancy phone systems, on computers
with new flat screens, on sponsorships and charitable
activities, and I don’t think anyone ever sits down and says,
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