What the future holds…

Herbert Smith’s Richard King on why the past is not necessarily a good indicator of what KM professionals will face in the business-driven legal services industry of the future.

Crystal-ball gazing can be bad for you. But it is too easy to get so stuck into the day-to-day that the future suddenly overtakes you. And, to paraphrase the old adage, while predictions of the future are risky, inherently uncertain and so always to be viewed sceptically, planning for possible futures is good business management. It’s in this sense that spending some time thinking about the potential evolution of knowledge management within the law can help us in planning and directing resources – and career development – for the future.

What lines are forming on the horizon? First, what I call mobilising knowledge for influence. In other words, using our know-how and intellectual flair to set the agenda rather than simply respond to it – and in particular, to direct our analysis and insight to benefit clients by directly interfacing with legislators to shape the regulatory climate and political environment in which they operate. Lawyers tend to start from what they know or want to know, and then conduct their analysis and research from there. But there is and will be a substantial premium to be paid for those lawyers who become more active agents in the use of knowledge and, in the interests of their clients, identify legal and market practices that need changing. On one level, this may be laws that need reform. On another, this is client business practices and policies that should change.

Clients will want this service more and more as they move to a relationship of partnership with their lawyers (the old principal-agent nature of the client-lawyer relationship will (if it’s not already) transition to one of collaboration) and as clients expect lawyers to prevent and avoid problems rather than patch up after the problems have arrived.

Lawyers will need to move from the reactive to the proactive use of knowledge, and will increasingly set the knowledge agenda for their clients. To use knowledge in this way to influence rather than simply inform, lawyers will need to do more proactive thinking about who they need to influence and how best they do it. Therefore our emphasis as knowledge professionals within law firms will be on innovation, not just best practice or the legal ‘how to’. We will consequently need a focus on research and development, and investment in this will become as important for a law firm as for a pharmaceutical company. Thought leadership becomes more than a phrase we can throw around to impress people about the sophistication of our knowledge function: it takes real shape and becomes the driver of much of what we do.

The next stone in the pond? It’s not just about the law, it’s about the business of law. The prizes for the law firms of tomorrow are not just how they win a technical edge over their rivals and impress clients with their intellectual wizardry. Perhaps more important in achieving success in the legal market-place is creating a sustainable business that is constantly improving its operational effectiveness. Can knowledge professionals contribute to this? Is this their job?

Of course! We have a massive part to play in helping lawyers work smarter and more productively. How do they learn from the work they have already done and avoid the same problems next time? How can we turn this knowledge and learning into value for the business? If we can make a substantial contribution to this, our firm’s leaders will understand the relevance of knowledge management to their business immediately.

In my view, it’s critical that knowledge professionals are involved in business/process improvement and capturing the knowledge of how their lawyers do things. This is a trend already strongly embedded in the knowledge operations of many of the businesses lawyers advise and we have some catching up to do.

To do this well, knowledge professionals will need to be facilitators and encourage learning on the job, which leads knowledge into a direct convergence with the learning and development function. The knowledge role needs to engage with process improvement (so that it assumes a role akin to a consulting function). A technical grasp of the law remains vital but a grip on how lawyers can work better will become more and more important.

A third change we are seeing is the democratisation of knowledge-sharing. The central knowledge manager will become a facilitator rather than a controller of the knowledge agenda as various developments take hold:

Employees use blogs to exchange and organise knowledge. Sometimes this is happening directly through the use of blogs. But more flexible tools than the rather fixed, backward-looking databases of traditional know-how systems – even as simple as the intranet – offer employees opportunities to share opinions and news more instantly than the older, traditional technology resources;

Central knowledge architecture gets added to and amended in real time by employees using and editing knowledge through wikis. This may be a scary thought to those who see the knowledge system as the font of all wisdom – the tree of a law firm’s life – to be protected like a shrine. Having multiple contributors with more flexible editorial processes poses problems for quality and consistency, but this shouldn’t make it a challenge to be ignored. It’s here and it won’t go away;

Modern systems enable people to personalise their knowledge space on their desktop. They will take what they want from what’s on offer: knowledge becomes a buffet rather than a set menu. Our objectives becomes one of offering choice and a range of options rather than prescribing to lawyers what and how they receive by way of know-how.

Knowledge professionals will have to experience and live through some discomfort as they start to lose close control of what is recorded as knowledge and how it’s organised. It’s not what we’ve been trained to do but it is another prize to be grasped: creating systems and resources that are flexible to fit the user and aren’t just what we think is best for them.

Knowledge professionals in law firms have tended to focus on the hard stuff of the law and practice in creating the knowledge systems to support their practitioners’ need to access documents. These systems are designed to answer fee-earner questions like ‘where do I find that note on directors’ duties?’, or ‘where is our standard form syndicated loan agreement?’, and so on. What they do not typically do, and have generally never been designed to do, is to answer the questions such as ‘who is the in-house wizard on pre-pack restructurings?’ or ‘where do I find someone who knows about Guinean law and lawyers?’. Increasingly, to use the old adage, it won’t be what you know, but who you know that will differentiate the nimble from the flat-footed lawyer, and this is the fourth change I see.

While some firms have built solutions to such questions into other applications, such as HR systems or internal directories, often it’s been more of an afterthought than a central plank of the knowledge architecture. Better social capital systems and processes, such as expertise location systems and the firm’s own version of Facebook, will become much more significant consumers of the time of knowledge professionals. Apart from anything else, the younger generation of lawyers anticipates and demands this as part of their cultural inheritance.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, something I have noticed increasingly is the expectation that knowledge professionals could and should play an influential role as one of the principal catalysts for change in a law firm. Often their association with the whole topic of innovation – because knowledge management is, above all, about how we capture the latest developments, changes and trends to speed up productivity and reduce duplication – makes them natural candidates to work with the firm’s management on broader change-management projects.

This may also have a lot to do with the fact that knowledge professionals are frequently preoccupied with the process of achieving cultural change – how do you ‘change’ the psychology of the lawyer who wants to hoard his/her know-how? While this does not make them experts on the mental, emotional or cultural processes lawyers go through, knowledge professionals are intimately associated with such questions and can lend this experience to other projects that are designed to influence and tackle how lawyers behave and develop – for example, new performance metrics or changes to working practices. This also ties in with the growing focus our knowledge efforts need to have with the business of law and the process of legal practice.

In fact, the firm’s management expects the knowledge professional to be at the forefront of identifying and recommending changes in best practice that will enhance the firm’s competitiveness. Knowledge professionals therefore need to stay close to key broad strategic developments in their firms. They also need to articulate the case for change and be its champion. They have a significant part to play in ensuring that their firms do not remain static or get overtaken by competitors.

My guess is that not many of the five points I have identified here would have figured in the typical job description knowledge managers in law firms would have been given in years past. But modern business life suggests strongly that the past is no effective predictor of the future landscape we will face.

Richard King is global head of legal knowledge at Herbert Smith. He can be contacted at: richard.king@herbertsmith.com