KM culture moves on

Knowledge management is no longer purely about drafting precedents and integrating digital content. By Heather Robinson.

Earlier this year IT research company Gartner published its research report, Knowledge Management Enables the High-Performance Workplace, which asserted that most large organisations have implemented knowledge management (KM) to support at least one critical business process and many have more comprehensive KM programmes. This has certainly been the trend within the UK legal market over the past decade, but it raises one significant question – how can firms differentiate themselves now that KM is a common business practice?

In 1999, when I first joined Bevan Brittan, the challenge was to get KM acknowledged, resourced and understood as a business process that would improve efficiency and contribute to the firm’s profitability. Our first steps toward creating the high-performance workplace of the Gartner report were to define a workable role for our knowledge workers and to then recruit competent professional support lawyers (PSLs) to capture both the know-how and support of their fee-earning colleagues. We learnt to understand and fit together that oft-cited trinity of people, technology and process, and to develop and promote a knowledge-sharing mindset.

Successful KM, at its roots, is about people and how they want to work. The Gartner report states: “Knowledge management supports the notion of a high-performance workplace through organisational values, culture, processes and tools that stimulate and support the organisation’s employees, partners and customers to create, capture, organise, access and use the organisation’s knowledge.” This cannot be achieved without the right team. Experience and professionalism are expected from all our information and professional-support staff. What sets a good knowledge manager apart is credibility, innovation, enthusiasm and the ability to adapt their role in line with organisational changes.

Change was one of the themes emerging from the Managing Partner seminar on ‘The Role of the Professional Support Lawyer’, which took place in April 2006. Pressure from clients and from within the legal market itself are leading firms to rethink their KM strategies and, in some cases, reconstruct their KM teams by bringing together library, know-how and business research.

At Bevan Brittan, the information, knowledge and business-development teams have long been grouped together within commercial development. The complimentary professional skills and synergies between these teams enable us to collaborate effectively to develop the firm’s understanding of the client, as well as the sectors and the legal framework within which they work. This is important in helping to inform and drive our client services, enabling us to be more innovative than ever before. PSLs provide the legal analysis, business-development managers give the commercial insight, while information services ensure that expertise, ideas and knowledge content are captured and made accessible.

The firm has taken this a stage further by investing in a firm-wide programme of awareness raising, story telling and ideas generation aimed at bringing together the best mix of skills and experience, both legal and non-legal, to meet the needs of our clients. This is not just for our lawyers – everybody is encouraged to share their experience, talent and contacts. This fosters a greater sense of enthusiasm and responsibility as individuals develop a greater understanding of how they can play a role in the way in which our clients see us. Business-development managers and PSLs are an integral part of this process, leading by example to develop a sense of trust and self belief to ensure that the behaviour and attitudes described here are at the heart of our culture.

Demonstrating the value your KM services can deliver needs to go beyond the drafting of model precedents and the integration of digital content. Many of these services can now be sourced from external technology providers and publishers. Our clients want to be sure that each job will be done well and delivered on time, that they can trust us to apply legal solutions within their business context. Many clients also hope to be kept informed, not just about the work we are doing for them, but also about changes to legislation and policy that may affect their market. Opportunities lie in providing focused and informed current awareness and best practice based on years of experience; and in building strong relationships, internally and externally, which extend the role of the knowledge manager and assist the firm to work constructively with clients.

Heather Robinson is head of information services at UK firm Bevan Brittan LLP. She can be contacted at heather.robinson@bevanbrittan.com