Q: Why won’t sharks attack lawyers?
A: Professional courtesy.
Even if you haven’t heard that old chestnut before, I’m sure you’ve heard at least one of the thousands of equally lame lawyer jokes that people all over the world love to repeat. It’s bad enough when a lawyer encounters one of these jokes in a social setting, but it’s beyond reasonable to expect a lawyer to take it sitting down when these jokes are repeated at the office by law firm knowledge management personnel.
Now, before you start protesting your innocence, think carefully. Even if you haven’t told one of the common lawyer jokes, have you ever said any of the following:
Our lawyer are so…
Our lawyers never…
Our lawyers love…
Our lawyers hate…
Oh really? Do you have the data to support your statements? Probably not. Yet KM folks in firms all over the world make these assertions daily based on their assumptions about lawyers. These often are worse than mere generalizations. In fact, they often are caricatures. The problems arise when you treat these caricatures as helpful personas while planning your KM program or implementing your technology. Inevitably, you end up with KM systems that are themselves pale shadows of what they should be. Not a good outcome.
So stop repeating lawyer jokes in the form of unsupported assumptions about your lawyer colleagues. Do the due diligence review necessary to understand properly how the lawyers in your firm work and what they need. Then you can create personas that actually will help you provide useful KM support.
And that’s no laughing matter.
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From Wikipedia:
Marc Galanter in the introduction to his book Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture cites a meta-joke in a speech of Chief Justice William Rehnquist:[2]
- I’ve often started off with a lawyer joke, a complete caricature of a lawyer who’s been nasty, greedy and unethical. But I’ve stopped that practice. I gradually realised that the lawyers in the audience didn’t think the jokes were funny and the non-lawyers didn’t know they were jokes.
[Photo Credit: guebosch]
Above and Beyond KM 
The more I read it, the more it impresses me. I don’t know how I ever worked without hilarious and funny things in our life, Life would be so much easier especially when there's a jokes here and there. Being funny is nice because a lot of serious people are lacking with this kind of behavior that is why they are much look older. I would like to thank you for your outstanding blog post. Keep it up! Awesome!
The more I read it, the more it impresses me. I don’t know how I ever worked without hilarious and funny things in our life, Life would be so much easier especially when there's a jokes here and there. Being funny is nice because a lot of serious people are lacking with this kind of behavior that is why they are much look older. I would like to thank you for your outstanding blog post. Keep it up! Awesome!
I worked for a top law firm as a KM specialist, so I know that the … PLEASE no lawyer jokes. I will give you a few so everybody is happy.