The importance of communication

Rosemary Gray, group head of knowledge management at Ogier, tells Caroline Poynton why effective communication is so important for successful KM in a cost-conscious environment.

Surviving the recession
In your view, what are the particular pressures that the recession has brought to bear upon KM initiatives?
The first indications that life was going to get tough came at the end of last year when we were putting together the budget. We were still under pressure to reduce costs, but had managed to put in a healthy KM budget to run a number of what we believed were key projects aligned to the business. As the recession deepened and the business did various reforecasts over the past year, we have come under more pressure to reduce costs. I have been very clear about the sort of costs I’m prepared to reduce – for example, cutting out duplication in subscriptions in online costs, and cutting out competing products if we believe one has the edge (even if it was a particular partner’s preference). We are looking very closely at improving our exiting return on investment, which has meant chopping away products that are low gain – with no appreciable benefit. We’ve also deferred some projects and reviewed some activities that are less effective than they should be.

How are you going about demonstrating value in the face of budgetary cuts?
It’s about trying to do more with the resources that we do have. It’s quite a difficult juggling act because there’s the view that we should run a lean ship at group and local KM service level, but we are still expected to deliver a range of projects, spearhead new initiatives and liaise on all of these areas of responsibility that KM has. We cover not just the KM infrastructure but library and information services, know-how and insight in the form of current awareness services, know-how bulletins as well as the legal technical training/legal education side. In all of those we have been looking at improving our game to ensure we meet the current focus of the business. We recently finished a project to upgrade our KM system and are in the process of rolling that out globally. We are constantly looking at ways that you can enhance that, including closer integration with our intranet software. Those are things that we can do without appreciable external spend.

In terms of new projects, we did have a project on the table where the project budget was cut as part of the reforecast. It will probably be revisited and put back into the pot for next year. But we have to really prove the value of doing it. This comes back to the approach that Ogier has taken to projects, which has been to introduce a project governance process to ensure that we do not do projects that do not have the backing of the five managing partners and the chief executive of the fiduciary services business. We have been quite detailed in our analysis of the benefits and productivity gains that completing projects will bring and we can point to the ROI over a period of years.

Raising the profile of KM
What do you find most difficult about managing all these responsibilities?
We have a problem of understanding. One of the constant comments is: “Well, we can see what a professional support lawyer does, and we can see what the local KM team does because we work with them every day. But you sit in a different jurisdiction – we don’t know what group KM does.” When I first arrived, I did presentations to the partners and fee earners, and we developed a ‘Knowledge at Ogier’ intranet portal, which I use for major KM communications. I’m constantly changing news items on the homepage, so that partners and fee earners know what we are doing. I have also developed relationships with senior people so that they understand the range of things that we are involved in. The legal education programme that I coordinate for Jersey is a good vehicle for getting to know fee earners and dealing with the partners and senior fee earners who deliver the seminars and tutorials. Wherever there is that level of contact, they understand and appreciate the value of what we’re doing. In our other jurisdictions, it is more difficult. I can’t fly to the British Virgin Islands and Cayman at the drop of a hat. I do make extensive use of videoconference lines though and I have regular talks with KM contacts in those jurisdictions.

Do you think the recession might bring about positive changes for the long-term practice of KM in your firm?
Now we’ve reprioritised what we do – we’ve chopped out areas that were not servicing the business directly. Of course there’s only so much you can chop away but we are very streamlined now in terms of how we operate. We’ve looked at using PSLs to generate income – combining the role with an element of fee earning, for example. We’ve also engaged in some tough negotiation with online [information] suppliers to keep budget in check.

We will come out of the recession with a much more commercial slant as to what we do in terms of value for money and meeting clients’ needs. There will be much more emphasis on knowledge networking and just-in-time delivery, rather than devoting all of our efforts to traditional knowledge capture, indexing, storage, and so on. We will look at the new social networking tools to facilitate knowledge sharing cross-jurisdictionally, which remains a challenge as otherwise we’ll end up with information silos locally. I’m optimistic of success through keeping an eye on quick wins, opportunistic projects, low-cost initiatives, incremental improvements and a much more aggressive and focused PR within the business in terms of our KM communications – making them more prevalent and obvious. We are ensuring that there’s always something of interest in our market intelligence and know-how bulletins and that we have strong relationships with key stakeholders in the business who are representing their key jurisdictions.

How can KM become more visible, better understood and better appreciated by those on the ground – i.e., your lawyers?
The fee earners are engaged in the process. So when we knock on doors we don’t get the doors shut in our faces, we get reception and the understanding that whatever we do to facilitate the development and dissemination of knowledge in the business is a worthwhile exercise. What has happened as the firm has grown is the need to make sure that whatever processes we put in place are transparent, easy to follow and integrated into fee earners’ working practices, so that they are intuitive rather than something they have to remember.

In a recession your know-how and precedents, and the information you have about recent deals or new developments are all potential marketing tools. I’ve found the fee earners are now more inclined to review their know-how and precedents and get them into shape for the upturn, because they recognise that they need to be much more proactive. They cannot just wait for work to come and find them.

Future plans
What are your plans in terms of social networking?
We don’t have the luxury of the Allen & Overys and Freshfields of this world. We don’t have lots of people to help us set up blogs and wikis. We are looking at the possibility of blogging within cross-jurisdictional practice groups because one of the partner fall-outs of the recession has been a curb on the recruitment of cross-jurisdictional PSLs who would take responsibility for coordinating and developing cross-jurisdictional know-how. So instead of resourcing it through a PSL, we’re looking at giving the fee earners the tools to work with and control themselves. Wikis are more problematic because there’s a level of legal risk in making them more broadly available, although larger firms seem to have cracked this quite well so we would look to them as a guide as to how we could make it work. We have a quite good informal network for knowledge sharing within the practice groups and it is something that everyone takes very seriously. There are very few formal systems to capture and record knowledge other than in the central repository. Blogs and wikis offer us an alternative for material that has less longevity, but is still worthwhile keeping – for example, for six months rather than two years.

What is the biggest challenge for you in your role in the months ahead?
The challenge for me is communicating what we’re doing and coordinating strategy and activities across the group so that we are moving forwards in each jurisdiction. If there are lessons to be learnt in one jurisdiction, we can easily look at reworking them for another. I suppose more of my time is spent in public relations (PR) rather than a pure KM role, pushing information out. It is important that people in different jurisdictions know what other fee earners in other offices are doing, including their successes in the KM area. Many of our precedents have global relevance – so if Jersey does something, then Guernsey will look at it and vice versa – it’s important that they are all aware of what’s going on in the firm.

In the long term, how do you think the recession and post-recession environment will impact the work of your KM professionals?

My belief going forwards is that the group KM team will be very closely aligned with the business in terms of working with the business development (BD) team and looking at the synergies of what we can exploit between those groups.

I report to a director of BD and KM, Chris Carpenter, and we are constantly looking at how KM can increase its visibility. It’s like internal BD for KM and it has been a very beneficial relationship.

Most of the things that we will be focusing on will be dictated by the business – providing easier ways of accessing internal and external knowledge, and promoting what we do through communicating our KM activities. I run a KM research skills training programme to make sure we maximise the benefits of the online services that we subscribe to because we are not always going to be on hand when a fee earner has a query. The legal education programme that I coordinate and manage for Jersey is also a great opportunity to improve our knowledge of what the business is up to and actually to understand, in more detail, the trends, new products, and what know-how and development we need to look out for. It’s a mutually satisfactory relationship in that sense.

It sounds like your role is very close to that of a communications professional.
I wish I were a communications professional! It certainly helps if you are at ease talking to everyone from the chairman down. Obviously I learn a lot from the BD team who are so good at promotion and promoting their work, and I think I have been very clear to my team that I want to see them sell the KM function more to the business. We’re gradually getting there. I wouldn’t say that we are experts at it yet but we’re certainly taking advantage of any opportunities to remind people that we are here.

If you could make one wish for the next year, what would it be?
My wish list would be more resources, more money and partner approval for some key projects that are up my sleeve. My expectations for the next year are that we will be very creative about doing more with the resources that we have, assuming that there will be no increase in headcount and the budget will be pretty flat too. It’s going to be about providing very economical but effective services across a growing and profitable group.

This article is an excerpt from Ark Conferences’ Delivering Business Critical Knowledge Management report, written by Caroline Poynton. For more information or to obtain a copy, please contact Robyn Macè at rmace@ark-group.com