Thought leader

By Juliet Humphries, consultant, Pierian Spring Consulting

Until relatively recently knowledge strategies tended to be focused primarily at achieving a set of knowledge tasks. More often than not, these tasks have been aimed at bringing fee earners and clients up to speed with new developments and ensuring that supporting know-how documents are in place. Less thought has been given to these tasks within the context of the firm’s wider business issues. Why is this? First, because business planning in many law firms has not necessarily been a particularly rigorous process. Second, because knowledge development and knowledge transfer have had an almost intuitive feel to them – those responsible know what the right thing to do is and just get on with it.

It is only in recent times that firms have started to look at their knowledge strategy in the context of their business objectives and business issues. Arguably, this doesn’t matter if everyone is doing the right thing anyway. But my view is that every firm has only a finite amount of resource – time, money and enthusiasm. There is a real need to get the ‘most bang for your buck’. Furthermore, law firms are knowledge businesses and so the development and exploitation of their knowledge capability is a fundamental business issue.

Putting a knowledge strategy together that is truly business focused will also get the message across to those that see knowledge as a necessary expense, but don’t really understand that doing the
right knowledge ‘stuff’ contributes directly to the profitability and health of the firm.

Focus on the business issue first. For example, are you expanding in a particular area of business, under even more pressure to reduce your fees for certain types of work or growing a team through lateral hire. From a knowledge perspective, what do you need to do to deal with this issue?

For firms with a central knowledge director or chief knowledge officer, it is often easier to get the ‘knowledge voice’ heard as the individual has a seat at the management table. You need to ensure that you are also listened to. This is vital, especially when competing with proposed solutions from human resources, finance, strategy and business development. The use of business rather than knowledge language plays a key part in this.

Where knowledge work is purely practice-based it is a more local constituency that needs to be influenced. A knowledge partner who is a credible part of the practice can be valuable in sending out the right messages. Professional support lawyers can also do a lot here. They need to ensure that they are seen as a key component of their practice group; a person who is delivering real business value rather than someone who is ‘doing know-how’, so the practice management team can tick the knowledge box.

Law-firm management and KM are each becoming more sophisticated. Working in tandem to ensure that law firms truly develop and exploit the capabilities and knowledge of their people for the benefit of their clients is not only a good thing – in business terms, it is the right thing.