Above and Beyond KM

It is the stuff of fantasy — for law firm knowledge management professionals, that is. Imagine law firm partners beating down your door asking to be involved in as many law firm KM projects as possible. Before you laugh derisively, consider the following report from The American Lawyer‘s ninth annual survey of managing partners, chairs, and other leaders of Am Law 200 firms:

Firms are also pushing for greater efficiency in their internal operations. Nearly half of respondents (49 percent) say they have aligned partner compensation with a willingness to cooperate in new initiatives, such as project management, knowledge management, and rethinking staffing requirements. Mentoring programs have also gained traction. [emphasis added]

Is this happening at your firm?

If it is, set aside some time to think about how best to take advantage of this windfall. Partners will come to you with views about what KM should do for their practice area. I’m willing to bet good money that many will focus on precedent collection projects or model document drafting projects.  These are obvious ways of building a knowledge base for a practice area, but are they always the best ways? Before you commit precious time and resources to these projects, take another look at the list of high-impact and low-impact law firm KM activities. You’ll see that both of these projects are on the low-impact list under the category of creating and maintaining content. This is not because they lack value. Rather, they have limited value unless undertaken in response to clear-eyed analysis as to the pros and cons of the project. Further, unless you  are diligent about finding ways to reduce cost through automation, these projects can require considerable amounts of time, money and manual work. For example, firm-sanctioned models can be a huge timesaver and training aid for lawyers drafting documents. However, these models tend to be costly:  they require a great deal of time, attention, willpower and political capital to move from the concept stage to the point where the model has been blessed and adopted by a practice group. While it might make sense to invest this heavily in a critical document that will be used so many times that its cost per use becomes negligible, it makes no sense whatsoever to invest that way in a document that will be used infrequently. Can you find other, less expensive ways to address the training or drafting gap?

One of the challenges of working in law firm KM is being a good steward of firm resources. This means investing in the KM projects that will provide the greatest return on investment for the firm.  Not every project will meet this standard. So, before you open the door to that long line of partners looking to get involved with KM, be sure you have a straightforward analytical framework for helping them understand how to assess potential ROI. (See some proposed indicia of impact.) And, be sure you have some suggestions of alternative, more productive uses of their KM-focused time and energy that balance their interests with KM needs. Partner time and attention is one of the most valuable resources within a firm. Don’t waste it on low-impact KM activities.

[Photo Credit: Jason Schultz]

Your New Year’s Eve celebration is a now a dim memory and, hopefully, you’ve fully recovered from the revelry. Now comes the hard part — putting plans in place to make 2012 a year in which knowledge management really counts in your organization. This is not just about creating a list of interesting projects and then tracking your progress on those projects. This is about ensuring you and your team are working on KM projects that really matter. Your challenge for 2012 is to make KM a real force multiplier in your law firm.

To recap, a force multiplier is something that helps the troops perform significantly better than they would without it. The key is that the improvement in performance should be substantial. And therein lies the rub. While lots of law firm knowledge management projects are worthy, too many result in incremental improvements in performance at best. In fact, a recent survey of senior large law firm KM personnel revealed that they were devoting far too much of their time and resources to projects that did not constitute true force multipliers. Based on their considerable experience, here is a list of the high-impact projects that in their estimation had a good chance of resulting in force multiplication:

• Creating smarter systems, processes and workflows throughout the firm
• Enterprise Search — ensuring that personnel can find what they need efficiently
• Matter Profiling/Tracking
• Providing a portal
• Investing in design — to ensure your KM systems fit with how people work and do not cause unnecessary barriers to adoption
• Promoting KM adoption practices / Training

And, here’s the list of the activities to which they currently devote considerable time and resources, but which they admitted were low-impact activities that had little chance of achieving force multiplication within their firms:

• Arguing with IT over priorities and resources
• Creating and maintaining content — legal models, practice guides, templates, etc.
• Data transfer
• Firm politics
• Getting buy-in from lawyers and management
• Intranet Management — this involves the daily tasks of editing pages (or chasing editors), ensuring content is maintained, etc.
• Manually categorizing or profiling documents
• Research/Search Requests (KM Concierge) — limited impact since you are helping only one person at a time
• Responding to individual requests for assistance — limited impact since you are helping only one person at a time
• Vendor demos

This suggests that if you want to make a real difference in 2012, you need to shift the bulk of your resources to projects that will deliver force multiplication.  But how do you actually move from aspiration to reality? Peter Bregman has a suggestion that can help you find your focus and then keep it throughout the year:

1. Identify your primary areas of focus for this year.  Bregman suggests identifying five areas of focus, but allows that anything in the 3-7 range would be reasonable. But no more.
   • What’s an area of focus? It is not a specific project or strategy.  Rather, it is an area in which you wish to make a difference this year.  For example, improving the speed and efficacy of information searches within your organization. For our purposes, it should be an area in connection with which you want to achieve force multiplication.
2. Then, using Bregman’s six box to do list (adapted as necessary to reflect your number of foci), label each box with the name of one of your areas of focus.  Label the remaining box “the other 5%.”  Next make multiple copies of this labeled to do list.
   • To create your annual focus tracker,  start with your list of current and projected projects for 2012. Transfer those projects to a copy of your labeled to do list, placing within each box the projects that will help you achieve force multiplication in that area of focus.  And what about “the other 5%” box?  Put here everything that has not been assigned to one of your areas of focus. The key to this system is that 95% of your time and effort should be spent on the areas of focus listed on this sheet, leaving “the other 5%” for the incidental projects that inevitable arise midstream.
   • To create your daily tracker, each work day take a look at the list of things you intended to undertake that day and then list within each box the tasks that relate to that area of focus.  Any task that does not relate to one of your areas of focus should be put in “the other 5%” box. Finally, schedule an appropriate amount of time that day to complete your priority items.
3. At the end of each week and each month, use these sheets as a check on your progress:
   • How are you distributing your resources across the areas of focus?  Is any area under-served? Are you spending more than the allotted 5% of your time on projects that fall outside your areas of focus?
   • Are the actions you’ve taken clearly moving you towards your goal of achieving force multiplication?  If not, what needs to change?
   • Are you accomplishing the tasks you set out to do? If not, should you minimize your distractions or minimize your areas of focus?

Now, let’s apply this to the world of law firm knowledge management:

1. Once you’ve identified your primary areas of focus, compare them to the lists provided above of high-impact and low-impact activities.  If you have not included these high-impact activities, why not? If you have included a low-impact activity as an area of focus (rather than as part of “the other 5%”), why did you do that? To be clear, the lists above are not prescriptive.  However, they do reflect a lot of experience.  To the extent your areas of focus differ, you need to ask yourself what about your firm puts it outside the norm of the firms reflected in those lists?
2. Fill out the daily tracker for yourself and for your department.  Do your daily time expenditures reflect a commitment to the areas of focus or are you and your team easily distracted by the crisis of the day?
   • In the interest of fairness, we need to admit that when you are in the client-service business, urgent client needs take precedence over nearly everything else.  Ideally, the urgent needs can be accommodated in “the other 5%,” leaving you ample time to work towards force multiplication. If that’s not the case, give some thought as to why these emergencies arise.  If it is a result of poor planning within the firm, can this be addressed by better training?  Do you have the right systems in place to address most client requests in a reliable and predictable fashion? If not, how can you improve your systems. The bottom line is that if you are in a constant state of crisis without good planning and systems in place, it’s extremely difficult to pay attention to the daily tasks that will move you towards achieving force multiplication.
3. On a weekly and monthly basis, take a look at your daily trackers.  What patterns are emerging?  Are you seeing signs of achieving force multiplication in your areas of focus?  If not, what needs to change?

There is no magic here.  It’s about finding your focus early, planning to achieve your goals, monitoring your progress, correcting your course as necessary, and then holding yourself and your team accountable for the results.

So there you have it — a plan for turning KM into a real force multiplier in your law firm, a plan for making KM count in 2012.  May the Force be with you!

This blog post was written originally for the knowledge management peer group of the International Legal Technology Association and can also be found on the ILTA KM Blog.  Thanks to Mary Panetta and David Hobbie for giving me the opportunity to write for that KM community.  Thanks also to Jeffrey Brandt, editor of Pinhawk Law Technology Daily Digest, who was the first to say “May the Force be with you” when he read my earlier posts on force multiplication.

[Photo Credit: Pete Reed]

Is KM a real force multiplier in your firm? That’s the challenging question I recently put to 40 senior law firm knowledge management professionals.  This led to an interesting hour of honest conversation that was so worthwhile that I’m recounting its highlights here in the hope that my readers might try this exercise in their own organizations.

Background:

As you may remember, I wrote a few months ago about the concept of force multiplication. In Are You a Force Multiplier? I focused on whether the projects we pursue individually have the effect of helping our organizations perform significantly better. A force multiplier is a factor that enables a fighting force to improve its performance many times over.  For the military, force multipliers range from technology and training to terrain and morale.  Each of these can equip a small force to fight with the strength and effectiveness of a much larger group.

The key to force multiplication is not to settle for incremental improvements, but to aim for dramatically improved results.  While it may not always be possible to calculate down to the last dollar and cent the actual value of your force multiplication efforts, it is wise to try to identify the indicia of impact that help you distinguish merely helpful projects from the projects that result in true force multiplication. For purposes of illustration, I showed the group how one might calculate the impact of a typical law firm knowledge management project: enterprise search.  According to a Google White Paper, the average knowledge worker spends one-quarter of their time looking for information. If you implemented a good enterprise search engine and were able to cut the time spent searching by one hour, what would be the impact on your firm?  One way to calculate the aggregate value of restoring one productive hour to each fee-earner is by the following formula:

[the number of fee-earners] X [their blended hourly rate] X [the number of working days in a year] = the value to the firm that year

The Exercise:

The participants sat at round tables to facilitate discussion. We asked each participant to write on separate index cards the three activities currently undertaken by their KM department that consume the most resources.  (Those resources could be time, money or psychic/emotional energy, for example.)  To ensure forthrightness and promote confidentiality, we asked the participants to refrain from putting anything on their cards that would indicate the identity of the firm or knowledge manager involved. Once everyone at the table put their completed cards in the middle of the table, each table sorted through the cards to see the range of activities.  Finally, we asked each group to rank the activities in terms of which ones represented true force multipliers and which ones were least effective as force multipliers. As part of this process, we asked the people at the table to consider the indicia of impact of each activity in order to find an objective means of measuring the extent to which an activity was (or was not) a force multiplier.

The Activities:

If you work in law firm knowledge management, you won’t be surprised by the activities listed by the participants.  These are the activities that currently consume the greatest resources for their departments. What about yours? Take a look at them and then, before reading further, see how you might rank these activities in terms of force multiplication.

• Arguing with IT over priorities and resources
• Building smart systems, processes and workflows
• Categorizing or manually profiling documents
• Creating and maintaining content — legal models, practice guides, templates, etc.
• Data transfer
• Design — to ensure the KM systems fit with how people work and do not cause unnecessary barriers to adoption
• Enterprise search
• Firm politics
• Getting buy-in from lawyers and management
• Intranet management
• Matter profiling/tracking
• Promoting KM adoption practices
• Providing a portal
• Research/Search requests (KM concierge)
• Responding to individual requests for assistance
• Training
• Vendor demos

The Indicia of Impact:

As the participants were weighing the relative benefits of the activity list above, they identified the following factors that helped them separate the merely helpful activities from the force multipliers.  This is not an exhaustive list, but certainly is a good starting point.

• allows efficient, on-demand self-service
• generates use/traffic
• increases convenience across the firm
• provides consistency and coherence across the firm
• provides leverage at all levels (firm, departments, practice groups, individuals)
• reduces time spent
• replaces multiple fragmented activities with a single, more coherent system
• the number of users affected

The Consensus:

The True Force Multipliers:

• Building smart systems, processes and workflows
• Enterprise Search
• Investing in design — to ensure the KM systems fit with how people work and do not cause unnecessary barriers to adoption
• Matter Profiling/Tracking
• Promoting KM adoption practices
• Providing a portal
• Training

The Low-Impact Activities:

• Arguing with IT over priorities and resources
• Categorizing or manually profiling documents
• Creating and maintaining content — legal models, practice guides, templates, etc.
• Data transfer
• Firm politics
• Getting buy-in from lawyers and management
• Intranet Management
• Research/Search Requests (KM Concierge)
• Responding to individual requests for assistance
• Vendor demos

Conclusion:

This is a tough exercise.  Many of us realized that the things we were doing really did not provide much more than an incremental benefit to our firms.  It was cold comfort to understand that we did these things because our firms asked them of us. Unfortunately, it is precisely those low-yield activities that many of our firms think knowledge management should focus on.  Why?  Perhaps because it fits with a narrow view of how to help practicing lawyers — by creating and expanding the lawyers’ form files,  with a little technology thrown in.  Or, it provides the benefits of a really good research assistant to help get an individual lawyer’s work done quickly. At the end of the day, this narrow view focuses on the individual rather than on the impact on the overall firm and does not result in true force multiplication.

This exercise confirmed for me the importance of focusing knowledge management efforts on practices and systems that have a beneficial impact across the firm.  In all honesty, this can be tough to do when you work for a partnership and every partner has a point of view, sense of ownership and specific client needs.  This exercise forces you to take an institutional view, but you may not be popular initially for doing so. This is where having enlightened leadership in firm management makes all the difference.

While it can be dispiriting to learn that much of what you spend your time doing has no material positive impact on your firm, the purpose of this exercise is not to depress. Rather it is to help us focus our limited resources on the activities that will provide the greatest good for the firm.  As stewards of firm resources, isn’t that really our job?

[Photo Credit: Leo Reynolds]

The day after Steve Jobs died, a knowledge management colleague at another law firm asked why a man who had such a profound influence on technology had seemingly little influence on legal knowledge management.  That stopped conversation for a moment.  Tongue firmly in cheek, I countered with the proposition that if Steve Jobs had turned his attention to legal technology, it would work a great deal better and be easier to use than it is.

All joking aside, my colleague’s question started me wondering about Steve Jobs’ legacy with respect to knowledge management.  After a little Google research, I must admit I haven’t found anything that Steve Jobs said directly about knowledge management.  However, I have found lots of things he said and did that legal KM should not ignore:

• Focus on Simplicity. Steve Jobs was famous for his commitment to simplifying tools and processes. His drive to eliminate fussy, confusing buttons from the cellphone led to the iPhone. Stephen Wolfram says that Jobs stood out for his astonishing clarity of thought.  He “took complex situations, understood their essence, and used that understanding to make a bold definitive move, often in a completely unexpected direction.” Sometimes lawyers and legal KM professionals can make the error of over-complicating matters.  Steve Jobs would not approve.
• User Experience Trumps All. Cliff Kuang, writing for Fast Company, said:  ”Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live….”  In short, Jobs was a “user-experience savant.” Kuang continues, “It’s not that Jobs doesn’t think like a consumer-he just thinks like one standing in the near future, not in the recent past.” Even if you don’t have someone like Steve Jobs in your firm, you can achieve better results by listening carefully to your internal clients.  Steve Denning argues that even with Steve Jobs’ famous aesthetic sense and conviction about what the customer wanted, Apple listened to its customers very carefully.
• Plan Early for the Next Improvement. The launch of a system or application doesn’t mark the end of the project, it’s just the beginning.  Cliff Kuang describes how this fact has become reality at Apple:  ”[Jobs] has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product introductions. Apple designers say that now, each design they create has to be presented alongside a mock-up of how that design might evolve in the second or third generation.”  Now contrast that with the plausible view that nothing much new is happening in legal knowledge management.  Things would be different in legal KM if Steve Jobs were in charge.
• Knowledge Sharing is Essential for Innovation. There is a famous story of the visit Steve Jobs paid to Xerox’s R&D facility.  Daniel Stuhlman recounts it in the following way:
  

  The computer mouse and the graphical interface were invented at Xerox’s research center. Steve Jobs went on a tour of the facility and was able to get enough ideas to create a new computer software system that eventually led to Mac OS and Windows. Xerox was never able to capitalize on its own discovery. Steve Jobs did not steal an idea, he took a great idea and developed it. I wonder if Xerox had a knowledge management problem or was Steve Jobs a gifted visionary?

If you are wondering what law firm KM might look like had Apple taken an interest in it, look no further than Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator.  I bet the lawyers in your firm would kill for a system like this.

[Thanks to Ron Young for reminding me about Knowledge Navigator.]

[Photo Credit: Cornelia Kopp]

The Florida Supreme Court wants lawyers to behave nicely with respect to their opponents.  Here’s how the court’s recent action is described in a press release by the American Board of Trial Advocates:

Commenting that `concerns have grown about acts of incivility among members of the legal profession,’ the high court noted ABOTA’s efforts to stress the importance of civility in the practice of law.  The Supreme Court emphasized to Florida lawyers old and new that practicing law is an honor that comes with responsibilities, paramount among which is civility, an often overlooked cornerstone of the legal profession.  The Court added to the Oath of Admission the following: `To opposing parties and their counsel, I pledge fairness, integrity, and civility, not only in court, but also in all written and oral communications.’

It’s well and good that some lawyers will show their kinder and gentler sides to their opponents, but what about colleagues within their own firms?  The hard truth is that law firm knowledge management faces some rather particular challenges based on the population we serve.  If you doubt this, take a look a some of my earlier posts on lawyers and lawyer personalities:

• What Makes Lawyers So Challenging?
• Personality and Law Firm Knowledge Management
• KM and Change-Resistant Lawyers

Now, let’s consider some specific challenges that all knowledge managers face.  Jack Vinson has done a terrific job of gathering in one place some things we know to be true about how people share knowledge.  In Rules of Knowledge Management, Jack starts with a summary of Chris Collison’s amusing take on Tom Davenport’s “Kindergarten Rationale” for sharing:

• You share with the friends you trust
• You share when you’re sure you’ll get something in return
• Your toys are more special than anyone else’s
• You share when the teacher tells you to, until she turns her back
• When toys are scarce, there’s less sharing
• Once yours gets taken, you never share again

These observations of kindergarten children are entirely consistent with what we know about “mature adults” operating in a work context.  In fact, the lack of trust coupled with some nasty lessons learned about the downside of sharing can lead to an epidemic of information hoarding within an organization. If this is what happens in the general working adult population, what can you expect from a lawyer population? Given their natural skepticism, high degree of autonomy, low sociability and resilience, and adversarial natures (see What Makes Lawyers So Challenging?), this group may find it even harder to share than your typical kindergartener.  While I’m not sure it is possible to change anyone’s fundamental nature (and that certainly is well beyond the capabilities of a knowledge management group), we can work with senior management to change the environment in which lawyers operate. Taking guidance from Fighting the Knowledge Hiding Epidemic, I’d suggest the following strategies:

• Build trust — emphasize positive relationships among employees
• Demonstrate the mutual benefits that result when colleagues share information
• Treat all workers fairly and respectfully, thereby reducing feelings of injustice and the need for retaliation

At the end of the day, perhaps we are really about trust management rather than knowledge management (to the extent either trust or knowledge can, in fact, be “managed.”) [Photo Credit: Kathy Cassidy]

Is it true that there’s nothing new under the sun? Given my fondness for innovation, I always find myself hoping there are at least a few exceptions to the rule.  In this spirit, I went to several knowledge management sessions at the recent International Legal Technology Association Conference looking for something new in KM.  I’m not sure I found anything that completely fit the bill — lots of interesting things, but not much that was truly startlingly new.  Now, to be clear, this is not in any way intended to be a criticism of ILTA.  By all accounts, the conference committee did a great job organizing the conference. [Disclosure: I was honored to be a member of that committee.] And, it’s not in any way intended to be a criticism of the terrific legal KM folks who made presentations at the conference.  Lots of them are engaged in useful and interesting projects.  However, I was left with the persistent feeling that what I was seeing was largely more of the same.

So if this was not the year of massive legal KM breakthroughs at ILTA, what could we take away from the KM sessions?

• Legal KM is maturing.  Most firms I heard from seem to be focused on improving and upgrading incrementally rather than on doing something radically new.
• I don’t remember hearing about any provocative new technologies. However, there was lots of interesting news about vendors in the legal vertical.
• People are trying really hard to make SharePoint work for them.  Some have gone so far as to customize SharePoint heavily in order to make it user-friendly.  Meanwhile, other firms have decided that they will NOT use SharePoint because it doesn’t provide the flexibility and support they need.  Still others are concerned about Microsoft’s commitment to the legal vertical.  These are discussions that need to be held more openly.  We could all learn from them.
• A few firms are doing some interesting work with respect to providing clients with legal resources and, above all, access to their legal teams.
• While some firms are “playing” with iPad apps, others have decided that the key is to provide full mobility of data to their legal teams. (I heard from attendees at this session that the highly innovative team at Mallesons is working on some wonderful tools to help clients and lawyers on the go.  However, I didn’t have a chance to see this presentation. (For information on their impressive Mallesons Connect tool, see my earlier report.))
• Alternative Fee Arrangements are providing an interesting place of engagement for some legal KM folks.  However, it sounds like many are still trying to figure out how to crack the code.
• Balancing information sharing and data security is becoming tougher, especially in light of increased regulatory and client demands for data protection.
• Kingsley Martin (President and Founder of KIIAC) has made a fascinating and potentially very powerful tool available for free.  His contract analysis website can help the smallest firm undertake detailed analysis and rapid document assembly.  If this gains widespread adoption, it could be an interesting way to crowdsource legal knowledge sharing.

Even if we didn’t have many presentations on innovations, there were hints about the next new thing.  Here’s what I heard:

• Firms are struggling with email filing and management.  Look for announcements about firms that believe they have cracked this puzzle.
• The legal process outsourcers are growing in strength and penetration of the legal market.  Some firms are looking for ways to use this trend for their benefit.  Perhaps by co-opting the LPOs?
• Social media advocates have been promising big wins for organizations that can harness the “power of social” behind the firewall.  While some firms have internal blogs and wikis, I didn’t hear of many firms that had a well-integrated, well-utilized social business platform for legal work.
• Some believe that the next big win will result from conquering the Electronic Matter File Challenge. Do you know of any firm that has done this yet?
• The presentation on Future-Proofing Your Law Firm spawned lots of hallway conversation during the conference.  What concrete steps are firms taking to ensure their viability? How do IT and KM play a role in this?
• One ILTA session that was definitely forward-looking focused on Transformation Through Emerging Technologies.  (See David Hobbie’s report on the discussion.)

Finally, if your firm or KM department is committed to innovation.  I’d commend to you the keynote presentations on innovation by Chris Trimble and Tom Koulopoulos.  In addition, take a look at the three nominees for ILTA’s award for the Innovative Member of the Year. There is lots of food for thought there.

Based on what I saw and heard at the ILTA conference, my sense is that most of the legal KM community is consolidating past gains rather than forging ahead in new directions.  This may be a reflection of the recent tough economic times.  Hopefully it’s not a sign that law firms are investing less in their knowledge management systems.  Perhaps next year we’ll see some real innovation.  In the meantime, please do let me know if I’ve missed some noteworthy innovation in legal KM.  As Ambrose Bierce said, “There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.”

[Photo Credit: wili_hybrid]

Is your firm or law department still counting its pennies? Or is your firm or company so optimistic about its prospects that you’ve been given a large budget to spend freely on knowledge and information management projects?

The headlines in the legal technology press often feature impressive, state of the art, large-budget projects. However, what if you don’t have a large budget? What if your firm is maintaining a tight control on costs? How do you undertake effective KM and IM projects?

At this summer’s ILTA Conference, we’re hoping to provide practical advice and real life examples of law firms and law departments that have found frugal ways to meet ambitious KM/IM goals. To that end, we’re looking for legal technologists who have implemented successful and cost-effective KM/IM programs. Specifically, we’re looking for legal technologists who have done so using free or very inexpensive resources. Perhaps they have found helpful open source software. Perhaps they have found a way to partner with vendors, clients or business partners to reduce or share costs. Perhaps they have found ways to use standard law firm tools like Microsoft Office to improve their KM/IM activities. Perhaps they have taken basic steps like creating a firm-wide taxonomy or ensuring that information flows smoothly without unnecessary duplication of effort.

If you are a successful frugal innovator or know someone who is, please let me know.  We’d love to hear your stories and learn from your success.

[Photo Credit: smackfu]

For the last few Sunday nights, my family has been completely absorbed by the upstairs downstairs drama of Downton Abbey. This English import provides a glimpse of life in an aristocratic home just before the First World War. One very poignant moment occurs early in the series when a man trained to be a gentleman’s valet realizes that the skills he has spent a lifetime perfecting are no longer needed.

I found myself thinking of that valet as I read some recent posts on the shifting boundaries of law firm knowledge management. There are some who seem bewildered to find themselves in a world where the traditional things they have done don’t seem valued anymore. Meanwhile, there are others who are finding increasingly inventive ways to stretch their job descriptions.

If you think we are not in a period of flux, you would do well to read some of the posts below. Taken together, they present a picture of law firm life and the role of the knowledge manager that is rather unsettled and unsettling. In the face of these tensions several law firm knowledge managers I know are looking for ways to ensure their continuing relevance. As is so often the case, the interests and innate abilities of particular individuals lead them to explore avenues (and hidden alleys) that may not have been within the traditional territory of knowledge management. I expect this will only accelerate. No matter what our views are on these developments, it’s hard to ignore the pace of change around us. The question for each of us is how are we going to reshape our jobs before the oncoming revolution does it for us?

• Toby Brown, Profitability and the New KM
• Ron Friedmann, Knowledge Management Reincarnated
• Ron Friedmann, KM Professionals Comment on KM Reincarnated
• Mark Gould, KMers can do anything: is that wise?
• Mark Gould, KM in law firms: rising to a challenge
• Greg Lambert, You Can Call It Knowledge Management If That Makes You Feel Better About Yourself
• Mary Abraham, Flat KM

What’s the future of the legal profession? And what role do technology and knowledge management play in the development of that future? These are the questions I’ve been pondering since I heard that Stephen P. Younger (President of the New York State Bar Association) had formed a Task Force to seize “an historic opportunity to shape the landscape of the legal profession.” The announcement of the Task Force describes an ambitious goal:

A panel of top legal minds comprising a diverse range of legal practitioners, including managing partners, law school deans and general counsel, will study and recommend ways to create a roadmap for the future use of technology in the profession, to improve legal education and training, to establish proper work/life balance for attorneys, and to reform the billing structure in law firms.

If there remains even one Rip Van Winkle lawyer who believes that it is safe to ignore technology, I’d rush them to the nearest litigator for a crash course on eDiscovery. Litigation has been changed in a fundamental way because of technology.  What about non-litigation areas of practices?  Have they undergone a similar change or are they due for a change? And what do these changes indicate about the future role of technology in the practice of law?

Knowledge management’s role is a little less clear cut.  While law firm knowledge management personnel are fond of saying that lawyers have been “doing KM” since the beginning of the profession, I suspect there are many lawyers who haven’t spent enough time thinking about how to embed good knowledge management practices in their legal practice.  Further, I suspect that there are some lawyers who feel that KM is a luxury that only large firms can afford. Against this backdrop, what role can or should KM play?

I’m writing this post in the hope that it will elicit your ideas and thereby enrich the public conversation about this important issues.  What should the technology and KM roadmap look like? What recommendations would you make to the legal profession with respect to its future use of technology and knowledge management?

Some advice to the lovelorn I read many years ago suggested that the best way for a young woman to reel in a young man was to ask him lots of questions about his favorite topic — himself.  From the vantage point of the 21st century, there are any number of objections one might raise regarding the assumptions underlying that advice, but even so there is something there that I’d like to explore further in the context of law firm knowledge management. Namely, the connection between conversation and relationship.

The best law firm knowledge managers build relationships with their lawyer and non-lawyer colleagues that develop over time into something rich and productive, yielding mutual benefits and, often, benefits for their firm.  This means relationships that involve good communication, cooperation and collaboration.  And, it all begins with good conversation.  However, a law firm isn’t always the easiest place in which to hold a conversation. In an environment conditioned by hourly billing, we all tend to be extraordinarily time sensitive.  As a result, our electronic and in person exchanges are often rather transactional – designed to achieve a limited (usually urgent) business purpose.  This can make it difficult to initiate and sustain conversations that don’t necessarily have a direct bearing on immediate client needs.  Yet, it is precisely the conversations with a perspective that reaches beyond the urgent and immediate that can have the greatest beneficial impact on client and firm.  Equally, sometimes a quick conversation held as you pass each other in the hall can surface key facts that shed new light on an old problem or help move a project forward.  Not every conversation needs to be heavy, but knowledge managers should work hard to ensure that every conversation is meaningful.  In other words, they should focus on conversations that count.

So what are the hallmarks of conversations that count?  Here are some suggestions:

• They are smarter conversations: They  focus on something that matters. As Hugh MacLeod has noted, taking a leadership position on something that matters is critical to success.  So why waste your time and talk on the ephemeral or the immaterial?  Make a commitment to yourself to hold smarter conversations.
• They enable a two-way exchange: They don’t follow a social script — “Hi, how are you?” “Fine.” <end of conversation>.  They are not data dumps.  Rather, they provide and elicit useful information.
• They move understanding forward: They are powerful tools for learning.  (And this means learning more in a conversation than the sad fact that your interlocutor is a self-referent bore.)
• They are strategic: Jo Haraf has written on how to use conversations strategically to discover unmet needs.  She provides a guide to structuring these conversations so that they yield tangible results.  Best of all, if your conversations are strategic (and well-executed), they often leave the door open to another conversation.  In other words, doing this right allows you to do it again.
• They are not self-referent. They are not focused exclusively on … YOU.  Enough said.

To be clear, this post is ABSOLUTELY NOT advocating more meetings.  In fact, meetings are sometimes inhospitable environments for meaningful conversation.  This post is advocating a focus on smarter conversations — conversations about things that matter, conversations that help build productive relationships. In fact, these are the relationships that make your work as a knowledge manager possible AND enjoyable.  So make your conversations count.

[Hat tip to Greg Lambert for reminding me to revisit Hugh MacLeod's blog.]

[Photo Credit: Hugh MacLeod]