Above and Beyond KM

My friends were so worried about me that they rushed over to check that I hadn’t lost my marbles. In fairness, their response could be considered reasonable given that I had just declared to a group of law firm knowledge management specialists that much of what we collectively were doing at that time shouldn’t be done the same old way.  It was a point of view many didn’t want to hear.

Several years later, we’re enjoying the benefits of enterprise search, better document management and work product retrieval tools, and lawyers who are much less phobic about technology. As a result, I’m even more convinced today than I was back then that law firm knowledge managers need to think hard about the work they are doing.  If they are still stuck in the mode of document collection and organization, they may face the unpleasant discovery that electronic tools can do much of this work in an automated and more reliable fashion.  Even those involved with content creation (i.e., the classic practice support lawyer), may soon find that the materials they currently create and struggle to maintain can be produced and more reliably maintained outside the firm on competitive economic terms. For example, the Practical Law Company offers lawyers an up-to-date set of model documents, practice notes, checklists and guidance on market terms (among other things), coupled with the economies of scale that are possible because PLC has more practice support lawyers than most firms and can spread the cost of those lawyers across many firms.  (Disclosure: I’m on PLC’s advisory board.)  For many firms in the UK and the US, this is an attractive option.

An even more radical alternative is what Jeff Vail refers to as “open source knowledge management,” which he claims is  “the most potentially disruptive technology for law firms.” According to him, even a large firm with a KM staff will have a hard time replicating the range of resources that will become available on the web through collaborative efforts of lawyers in many firms.  Here’s how he describes it:

What lawyers do, at its core, is manage knowledge and implement systems for applying that knowledge to solve clients’ problems.  I’m not talking about case law, statutes, and other knowledge accessible via legal research here ….  Instead, what I’m talking about is the knowledge of how to apply the law, lists of best practices for doing so, and systems for applying those best practices. …[but] even the most experienced lawyer doesn’t have access to the depth and breadth of best practices available to the “crowd.”  For that reason, the potential of open-source knowledge management and development of legal systems (checklists, indexes of best practices, etc.) has the potential to truly disrupt the way most lawyers and law firms do business today.  Additionally, while many firms tout the benefit of their institutional knowledge to clients, no firm can compete in breadth and depth with a cooperative, open-source knowledge management tool that connects solo and small firms across the country.

Put another way, if a lawyer is carrying out tasks that are closely circumscribed by the requirements of statute or regulation, with little room to improvise, chances are that the task list that lawyer creates to manage that process will look a lot like the task list created by a lawyer in another firm.  In this context, an open source industry standard begins to look very appealing.

Obviously, risk management experts will have concerns about the reliability of open source legal resources and I don’t intend in any way to appear to be minimizing those risks.  Their concerns are reasonable and valid.  That said, I must admit that if there were a reliable open source knowledge management resource, it would be the most rational and cost-effective approach as far as clients and lawyers are concerned.  Of course, if that day ever comes, some law firm KM jobs will have to change quite radically. Are you ready?

[Photo Credit: Brooks Elliott]

Lawyers in most firms are given a lot of freedom to decide how to manage their own knowledge. In fact, it’s a rare law firm that can demand that its lawyers handle their knowledge in a particular way. For many, the battle began and ended with the document management system. At this point, most firms with document management systems have persuaded their lawyers to create and store documents primarily within the DMS. This has the signal benefit of ensuring that the firm’s work product is located in one place.  The problem, of course, is that while you can require that documents be created within the DMS, it’s much harder to get lawyers do anything more than the most rudimentary profiling of their documents.  As a result, it has until recently been extremely difficult to capture much metadata regarding a document. What’s changed? In part, it’s that lawyers are beginning to learn the value of metadata to assist in the document searches they do every day.  In addition, new document management systems are more intelligently designed and allow simpler filing of documents, coupled with the ability to let new documents “inherit” metadata from the folder in which they are placed.  Couple this with the metadata extraction capabilities of some work product retrieval systems, and the burden on the individual lawyer to create metadata is lightened considerably.

So the good news is that after nearly 20 years of document management systems, we’re finally getting to a point where the technology allows them to work more seamlessly and intuitively for lawyers.  This should encourage greater use (and more rewarding use) of the DMS by lawyers. The bad news is that relatively little of a firm’s knowledge in contained in its work product. What’s your strategy for dealing with that problem?

Unless your firm is run by Attila the Hun, you won’t be able to compel lawyers to share their knowledge via a central repository or medium.  Further, you will run into the problem observed by Steve Denning (see The Economic Imperative to Manage Knowledge) regarding the behavior of “experts” with respect to their knowledge:

As preliminary efforts to establish what the organization knew were launched, it started becoming apparent – to the surprise of many – that the organization did not know what it knew. Inquiries as to the cause of the hesitancy revealed that even the experts were not sure of what they knew. The experts even contested whether they were responsible for sharing their knowledge. They often contended that their job was to meet with their clients and deal with their needs, not sit in an office in headquarters and assemble best practice manuals.

What’s the solution? If you can’t compel sharing, you’ll need to coax sharing.  The best way to do this is to work individually with your experts to identify their personal knowledge management challenges and then find ways to address those needs in a manner  that results in a solution that is satisfactory for that expert AND yields rich material in a selectively shared content repository. Notice, that I used the words “selectively shared.”  Unless you can promise some measure of control over the knowledge, you’ll have a hard time winning the cooperation of your experts.  They will undoubtedly want the freedom to gather and organize the content as they see fit — not as necessarily as the IT department dictates. The key here for technologists and knowledge managers alike is to provide very lightweight systems that provide the individual flexibility cherished by experts. One obvious choice is the range of Enterprise 2.0 tools now available, but I could imagine implementing some firm-wide systems in a way that encourage personalization, sensible organization and sharing rather than the unmanageable wilderness currently found in everyone’s favorite content repository — Outlook.

One challenge is that your work with these individual experts will result in information silos.  However, you can go some distance in managing these new silos by ensuring that the content can be shared easily. Then, see the good that happens when your intelligently-designed system interacts with what Dave Snowden observed as our basic tendency to help in times of true need.

The bottom line is that you have to build a coalition of the willing — willing experts, that is.  Once you’ve helped them organize and find what they know, they’ll be better equipped to share that with others.

[h/t to John Tropea for pointing out the Steve Denning piece]

[Photo Credit: lumaxart]

I’m a little startled to report that I begun practicing law nearly 20 years ago.  (Since I don’t feel that old, perhaps the space-time continuum can explain this fact!) In the intervening time, one of the things that lawyers around the world have mourned is what they perceive as the transition of relationship-based interactions with clients to a situation where legal work is a commodity much like any other and the relationship between client and lawyer does not seem to be as highly prized (or reliable) as before.  According to this view, as law has declined from a profession to a business, some lawyers (and clients) have dropped their focus on relationships and hoped that results alone will win the day. However, as we’ve been discovering in law firms and other kinds of organizations, most people crave connection  — even at work. The loss of connection leads to loss of personal investment, loyalty and satisfaction.

Into this sorry mess comes Enterprise 2.0.  As I’ve been experimenting with social media tools inside and outside the workplace, I’ve been struck by how they help forge and build connections.  Further, with this foundation of relationship in place, knowledge sharing become easy, efficient and effective.  We move from working in silos to working together, without much additional effort at all. In fact, the beauty of the tools is that the best of them are extraordinarily easy to use.  While some use cases are undoubtedly more helpful to the enterprise than others, the number of use cases is usually limited only by a lack of imagination.  This presents a wonderful opportunity for the enterprise.

Ross Dawson takes this further by describing the alchemy of combining knowledge + relationships.  He starts by quoting Norman and Ramirez, who said 17 years ago:  “the essence of strategy is to `link together the only resources that matter in today’s economy: knowledge and relationships.’”

They are right.  Linking knowledge and relationships is even more critical today than it was then.  Here’s how Ross Dawson describes the situation within today’s organization:

An organization cannot function with only commoditized supplier relationships or strong partnerships – both are required depending on the function and situation. However the danger is that the shift to commoditized, price-based relationships takes away from the energy put into relationships based on trust and deep mutual knowledge. Today more than ever, those who are better at developing rich knowledge-based relationships have an enormous advantage over their competitors, not least in being able to innovate more effectively.

Enterprise 2.0’s gift to law firms (and other organizations) is that it gives us a way to restore our foundational relationships, both among colleagues within the firm and with our clients.  When law firm knowledge management is focused on building relationships and facilitating communication, knowledge sharing becomes much easier.  And, at the end of the day, making knowledge sharing efficient and effective is one of the key reasons law firms invest in knowledge management.

[Photo Credit: Wombatunderground1]

Am I creating value? That’s the key question to start and end every working day.

For knowledge management professionals, it can be a tough one to answer honestly. Why? Because many of us struggle with proving the value of knowledge management efforts. We know that we’ve helped individuals, but we are often hard pressed to explain how much we have in fact helped.  For example, you might truly believe that the enterprise search engine you’ve painstakingly implemented will save lawyers time and effort, ultimately saving clients money.  But do you have any metrics to prove it?  Unlikely.  So how do you know that your search engine project creates value?

One approach is to sit next to your colleagues with a stop watch measuring the time spent on searches before and after your enterprise search engine is implemented. Then you should have the data necessary to prove value numerically.  But how do you measure user satisfaction? You could ask users to complete a survey.  With tools like zoomerang or surveymonkey, it’s almost too easy to do this.  However, the real challenge lies in how the survey is constructed and interpreted.  An additional problem is that it can be hard to coax busy lawyers to complete your survey.

If you’re looking for ways to show how much value you’ve created, consider the example of Morrison & Foerster.  On a page whimsically entitled “Geek Power,” the firm makes the following claims about their knowledge management program:

They back this up with an exercise they undertook in 2006 to prove value.  Specifically, they retained Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith Esq to talk to MoFo attorneys about their experiences before and after AnswerBase.  According to Bruce MacEwen:

I was retained by Morrison & Foerster to lead an analysis and review of AnswerBase vis-a-vis its predecessor Knowledge Management system during last summer and fall, and reached the resounding conclusion that AnswerBase was strongly superior to the firm’s legacy systems, by providing highly relevant documents and discovering genuine subject-matter experts within the firm with impressive accuracy.   By interviewing a broad cross-section of lawyers at the firm’s New York offices, I was able to determine that the design and functionality of AnswerBase essentially replicate, as I put it in my report, “the way lawyers think” rather than reflecting technical considerations or limitations.

Admittedly, hiring someone of Bruce MacEwen’s caliber will be hard to justify for every small project on your to do list.  However, I’ve recounted this story to remind you (and me) that sometimes it makes a lot of sense to bring in an impartial third party to help you and your colleagues see what is right in front of you.  And if in the process you manage to demonstrate that your KM efforts have created value, that’s all the better.

[Photo Credit: Dave Elmore]

Mitchell Library, Sydney

A startling blog post entitled reflection on KM and libraries in law firms came over the transom today. In it Morgan Wilson, a law librarian, recounted his experiences of working in a library that was part of a law firm knowledge management department.  These experiences led him to the conclusion that it is not a good idea to put KM in charge of a law firm library:

I’m not writing to criticize KM per se, but to express concern at what happens when KM is left in charge of the library – at least from my own experience. I’ve seen that in this situation, KM ends up cannibalizing the library, creating a two tiered system in which the library is definitely subordinate. The library remains responsible for reference, document delivery and training; time intensive activities which KM doesn’t want to be burdened with. Cataloging remains with the library by default, but it is not appreciated or understood by the KM masters and is marginalized.

KM takes on several higher status activities which the librarians used to be responsible for: liaising and outreach with the users in the practice groups, developing the research section of the intranet, working on new ICT projects and managing the library staff. Because KM is taking on additional work, it needs more people. The trouble is that KM professionals are lawyers and are not cheap. To balance the books, the library is shrunk.

While I’m not ready to endorse or argue with his position, reading his blog post did make me reconsider what I thought I knew about what Morgan Wilson calls “the ideal relationship between the library and KM.”  In thinking through the relationship, I found myself wondering about the following issues:

• How much of his situation was due to difficult personalities or bad management?
• Is there something in the law firm “caste system” that makes it challenging for lawyers and non-lawyers to work together?
• Do librarians respond differently than knowledge managers? If so, is this due to personality type or training?

If you are pondering a merger between the information professionals in your law firm you should canvas widely the experiences of your colleagues in other firms.  Do their experiences match those of Morgan Wilson or did he have the misfortune to be in the wrong department at the wrong time? If you find that his experiences are typical, here’s the next question you should consider:  is this inevitable or is there something you and your firm can do to create a more harmonious and productive relationship between a law firm’s library and knowledge management department?

Finally, here’s another way of looking at these issues:  perhaps the battles (real or perceived) between librarians and knowledge managers are really the death throes of an obsolete system.  Consider that 25 years ago, an information professional was a librarian and during the last 15 years, knowledge managers have become the information professionals du jour.  What will be expected of an information professional in the 21st century?

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Additional Resources:

• Larry Hawes, The Changing Role of Information Professionals: New Opportunities Created by Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business
• Special Libraries Association,  About Information Professionals

[Photo Credit: Christopher Chan]

This is not about that solitaire game you play surreptitiously when you should be filling out expense reports. And, it’s not about office politics or power struggles. Games at work is serious business and they offer interesting possibilities for law firm knowledge management and lawyer professional development.

A press report about the recent acquisition by Reed Hastings (NetFlix CEO) and Charter Fund of DreamBox Learning got me thinking about the potential positive impact of breaking out of the rather contained way many law firms approach knowledge management and professional development. DreamBox Learning allows children to “learn at play” by offering hundred of lessons via online games.  These lessons currently teach math concepts.  Over time, the company intends to extend their offerings to cover a variety of other subjects.  Each child playing the game first selects an avatar and then dives into the game.  According to DreamBox CEO and Co-Founder, Lou Grey:

`The kids can go off on a million different paths, depending on their own pace of learning,’ Gray said. `We give them individual hints and can track their progress.’

Imagine what mandatory continuing legal education would look like if we took it out of the classroom or conference room  and put it online in a game.  Imagine if we were to compensate associates on the basis of knowledge and skills acquired during a training game and then used in an actual client engagement?  The associate’s knowledge and skill acquisition could be measured and tracked objectively via the game rather than just subjectively via the sketchy written review provided long after the fact by the associate’s supervising partner. Imagine if we could use the tracking data to deliver to a lawyer specific knowledge resources that are pitched to their level of expertise.  In other words, a junior associate might receive introductory materials covering the subjects that were new to them, while a partner might receive a bullet-point list highlighting key policy or judgment issues that usually arise in a particular type of transaction.

The idea of dynamically adapting the resource to the user is a powerful one:

DreamBox Learning has been successful in part because it designed its software to be adaptive. That means when kindergarten through third graders play the online math games, the software tracks their progress and adjust the game to match the difficulty of the lessons based on each child’s scores.

Is this something we could try in a law firm?  Or, are law firms too serious for even serious games?

[Photo Credit: libraryman]

One of the great challenges of KM 1.0 is that we have to make guesses about the future when populating our document repositories. When considering whether or not to add a particular document to the collection, we have to make a bet as to the likelihood that this particular content item will be useful or even remotely interesting at some point in the future.  But how do you really know?  How often are you right? And do you have the metrics to vindicate your guesses?

To add insult to an injured system, law firm knowledge managers ask their lawyer colleagues to invest in these document repositories by contributing content in the hope that some of this content might be helpful someday.  Not surprisingly, law firms around the country have reported that few lawyers actually make the effort to contribute content.  Before you launch into a diatribe against lawyers, I should remind you that this lack of engagement is more a human failing than a commentary on lawyers.  If you don’t believe me, consider a recent article by Jane Brody in which she discusses the widespread failure of society to motivate people to exercise more.  Some try threats, while others try promises.  However, the results are the same:

… for many people, future health benefits may just be too abstract and speculative to overcome inertia and take up walking, running, swimming, cycling or working out in the gym.

According to Dr. Michelle Segar, a motivational psychologist, we shouldn’t make exercise (or contributing to the KM system) a chore or matter of obligation.  With respect to exercise, she suggests ” borrowing the motivational approach used by commercial marketers, `an emotional hook that creates positive, meaningful expectations of how exercise can enhance people’s lives, a way to feel better.’”

If we can’t get people to exercise now in the exchange for promises of good health and long life later, why do we think that promises of future benefit will increase levels of lawyer engagement in law firm knowledge management?  When it comes to exercise, Jane Brody reports that people tend to be more willing to stick with an exercise regime over the long term if they receive current tangible benefits from exercise buddies or communities that spring up around exercise activities:

For years now, I’ve been struck by the camaraderie among the elderly women, most of them widows, whose water aerobics class follows the morning lap-swim. Few knew one another before they joined this activity. Now they lunch together almost every month, celebrate birthdays together, check on one another if someone fails to attend a session or two, even raise money for a beloved staff member who lost her job in the recession.

Are there ways we can apply this approach to lawyer engagement in law firm knowledge management activities?  And, when we are asked “what’s in it for me,” do we have an answer that explains the current, tangible benefits of lawyers engagement and contribution?

[Photo Credit: Scott Ableman]

“Drinking your own champagne” was how Jo Hoppe, CIO of Pegasystems, described the process that some with a less elegant turn of phrase have called “eating your own dog food.” It means using your own products and taking your own advice.  It also means moving out of the world of the theoretical into the painfully practical. Jo Hoppe calls this becoming “a living laboratory.” And nowhere is this needed more than in knowledge management and Enterprise 2.0 deployments.

Knowledge managers (at least in the legal industry) are accomplished when it comes to identifying the “things lawyers won’t do.”  You don’t even have to buy a law firm knowledge manager a drink before they start complaining about how lawyers don’t attend training sessions, or won’t spend enough time in an application to see its full range of capabilities or won’t take a few minutes to properly profile or file a document.  This conversation can rapidly disintegrate into a pity party unless you have a real life corrective.  So, I suggest that we all drink our own champagne.   But, before we can open that bottle of bubbly, we need to have a few moments of honesty and ask ourselves some questions along the following lines:

• Do we take measures to “walk a mile in the shoes” of the lawyers we seek to assist?
• Do we follow processes within the KM group that promote transparency and mutual accountability?
• Is our natural tendency within the KM group to behave competitively or collaboratively?
• Are we using Enterprise 2.0 tools to facilitate the information flow within the KM group?
• Do we have personal experience of the benefits of social media tools before trying to sell it to our colleagues?
• Do we keep ourselves up to date on the training we need to be productive?

What are your answers?  Are you in the “do what I say, not what I do” camp or do you actually drink your own champagne?  One director of knowledge management I know posts all of her team’s projects on her firm’s intranet, showing goals and achievements (as well as shortcomings) against plan.  In so doing, she embraces the transparency that is a key part of social media use within the firewall, shines a little light on the work of her team and makes herself accountable for the work of her team.  Others use wikis and blogs to manage KM projects, thereby giving their teams invaluable first-hand experience of the benefits and deficits of the software and processes they are using.  They are world-class quaffers of champagne.  What about you?

[Photo Credit:  Waldo Jaquith]

The Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) is once again sponsoring a survey to determine the current state of law firm knowledge management. Given the upheavals in the legal industry of the last few years, it will be interesting to see what if any changes emerge from the survey data.

Here’s the request from ILTA:

The KM Peer Group is conducting its biennial knowledge management survey to probe the trends, hot topics and development of KM in the legal industry. Results of the survey will be published in the KM White Paper scheduled for publication in June.  Please take five to ten minutes to complete the survey or forward it to the appropriate KM person in your organization (we only want one response per organization). As an incentive to participate, we will draw three names from our pool of respondents –– two winners will receive $500, and a third will receive his/her choice of $500 or a waived registration fee for ILTA 2010, the annual conference (a $1,025 value).

And, here’s the link to the survey, which will remain open until March 26:  www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22ABG2QSZN4,

ILTA requests that you submit only one response per firm.  Thank you for participating and Good Luck!

Today is Groundhog Day. I have no idea whether Phil the groundhog will see his shadow, but I try never to forget what happened to Bill. Who’s Bill? Bill Murray in the movie, Groundhog Day. Because he resisted growing up and moving forward, he was condemned to repeat Groundhog Day until he did something to break the cycle.

Law firm knowledge management (and perhaps KM generally) seems to be in a Bill Murray repeat mode in many places.  We’ve all found some things that work (or worked at one time), so we repeat them.  We’ve also been asked to do some things that we know don’t work, but cannot overcome the pressure to meet these low expectations, so we repeat them.  Continue like this, and you run the risk of running KM into the ground.

So how do you break free?  Don’t look to new technology.   Technology won’t work well unless you have a clear vision of its uses and limits.  A tool implemented blindly won’t provide the forward momentum a firm sunk in KM Groundhog gloom needs.  The better approach is to start thinking strategically about your KM program.  Given the upheaval of the last couple of years, what does KM need to do in your firm to help it respond to economic pressures?  Have the practices of your firm changed?  Has your KM program kept pace?  Is there an opportunity to embed KM in a practice group or client team?

Everyday is KM Groundhog Day and everyday is an opportunity to to break the cycle.  Just think strategically.

[Photo Credit:  Jimmy Wayne]