The last word: Current awareness for clients

Fiona Evans details how the role of client-facing knowledge lawyers has evolved and the importance of current awareness in service delivery.

Current awareness – keeping fee-earning lawyers up to date with legal and market developments – was the bedrock of the traditional role of a know-how lawyer. As the availability of and access to information improved, its volume became overwhelming. Providing edited highlights, usually in the form of a regular newsletter, became necessary. Ideally, the highlights would be accompanied by comments from the know-how lawyer, who used his or her experience to set the information in its practical context. In many firms, this used to be the whole job of a know-how lawyer.
Sharing know-how with clients was perhaps less of a priority in the early days. Although client briefings are hardly a new invention, client-facing know-how has developed in the past few years both in terms of the inventiveness of its delivery and the seriousness with which it is taken by firms and clients alike. Lately, its position has been reinforced by the keenness of clients to extract the maximum ‘added value’ from their legal advisers. Law firms are generally happy to oblige because the benefit as a business development tool is undeniable. Taking the example of training events, either tailored for individual clients or when clients attend seminars alongside fee-earners, the relationship-building and knowledge-sharing opportunities are obvious.
A cost-effective principle for client-facing know-how is to capitalise on work done for the benefit of fee-earners and adapt it so that it faces outwards to clients. Training events are the clearest example of this principle at work, but many firms offer their most loyal clients access to library and know-how teams for help with research and questions in the same way that fee-earners would use them. Anecdotal evidence from in-house legal teams and fee-earners on secondment to clients suggests that restricted access to current awareness is one of the ways in which in-house teams feel exposed. Law firms spend huge sums of money on electronic resources providing regular current awareness to fee-earners, but law is the business of the firm; the in-house legal team at a client organisation, as an adjunct to the main business, is unlikely to be first in the queue for money to pay for subscription-based know-how.
Here’s the rub, though. On one hand, just as there is an appetite among clients for bread-and-butter training provided by law firms as well as seminars that showcase cutting-edge knowledge and skills, there is also a place for plain, traditional newsletters covering day-to-day legal developments as well as glossy briefings. On the other hand, know-how teams are as much under pressure as everyone else to raise their game and concentrate on activities that are perceived to have a high value to the business.
This is not simply a feature of the current economic situation, although this has thrown the matter into sharper relief. Know-how teams are still encouraged to concentrate on ‘high-value’ activities, but they are often doing so with fewer resources, both in terms of people and cash available for subscriptions. Know-how lawyers are usually very experienced and therefore relatively expensive. A firm that has accepted the value of having know-how lawyers is nevertheless unlikely to accept that sifting and dissemination of current awareness, even if accompanied by contextual comment, is cost-effective use of a know-how lawyer’s time and experience.
Outsourcing of current awareness is expensive, but less so than the combined time of a paralegal and a know-how lawyer required to produce a bespoke version for internal consumption. Although fee-earners may complain that the outsourced version is not as targeted as the bespoke one, time liberated from current awareness can be spent on providing advice to fee-earners, writing precedents, delivering seminars and devising interesting and innovative ways to share know-how with clients, all of which make better use of the know-how lawyer’s experience and represent better value for money than current awareness.
The need for current awareness services among in-house legal teams is as pressing as it is for fee-earners in law firms. What better solution than to ask law firms to provide the current awareness? It should be easy enough to tailor a newsletter to remove confidential references and make it suitable for client consumption. What if the law firm no longer produces newsletters, though? Providers of subscription services, for understandable reasons, are unwilling to allow their content to be passed on systematically by law firms to non-subscribers. A request for regular updates on legal developments – current awareness, not cutting-edge analysis – features on the wish lists of many clients in requests to tender for positions on panels, but it is something which the reliance of law firms on outsourced current awareness renders increasingly difficult to provide.
How odd that the most basic level of know-how should become the most difficult to share with clients. Have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater?

Fiona Evans is head of know-how at Norton Rose LLP. She can be contacted at fiona.evans@nortonrose.com