Profile: David Jabbari

International firm Allen & Overy's global head of know-how David Jabbari discusses the importance of technology as an enabler in people-centric knowledge management. Interview by Kate Clifton.

Before joining Allen & Overy, you worked as a director at Bird & Bird. How useful has this been to you in taking on the challenges of your current role?

“Very useful. Bird & Bird is a firm that has a very acute understanding of the markets in which its clients operate and of the technology that drives those markets. I remember doing research there, more than six years ago, on new technologies that are only now appearing in the consumer market. It was an absolutely routine event for me to invite clients and industry specialists into the firm to talk on internal seminar programmes. So, while the firm accepted that technical excellence was the bedrock of legal practice, it supplemented this with extensive market knowledge and a range of more business-related management skills, all of which were ahead of the game at that time. Because the firm was at the cutting edge of technological developments in its advisory work, this spilled over into an internal interest in technology. More than ten years ago the firm was doing experiments with the then available equivalents of Google-style search technology. I also started an e-learning company with the partners, in 1999. So, I’m always a little amused when people say that I seem quite sceptical about the use of technology in knowledge management (KM): I always try to make the point that I’m very interested in technology. I just think that history shows that IT on its own will never be a complete KM solution. ”

You’re actually introducing e-learning into your overall know-how strategy at Allen & Overy…

“It was clear to me at Bird & Bird that the digital era was going to have a revolutionary effect on both training and the dissemination of knowledge in law firms. With e-learning, there was a potential for convergence between face-to-face training and knowledge distributed in other ways. I often use Allen & Overy’s famous Fountain Guides as an example. If you take something that currently exists in a hard-copy format, or as an online book on our network, such as the Fountain Guide on drafting, and convert it into a more interactive format, it becomes e-learning. Whether it’s presented face to face in a lecture, is read, or is available online as a learning module, the point is that it’s the same material distributed through a number of different media. We are currently doing some pilot work with the Fountain Guides to convert them into a more interactive, e-learning format. I actually find the term ‘e-learning’ pretty useless. It is better to think in terms of the electronic dissemination of knowledge and ask how interactive you want that knowledge to be. There is a sliding scale of interactivity, and cost.”

What about the introduction of social-networking software, such as wikis?

“This has been an enormous area for us. I was as sceptical as anyone about the potential for corporate application of social software – blogs, wikis etc – that has now become a routine part of our childrens’ communication practices. After all, we do a lot of things as children, which we later learn were misguided (I used to support West Ham, for example). But in social software I saw a way that technology could underpin my view that know-how is more about people than process. I believe that the core value of knowledge in our firm is in its use and exchange between our lawyers, not in its storage in a database. The whole social-software phenomenon – which admittedly is still in the ‘hype’ cycle of its growth – has been a very good example of how technology can get people talking online, and produce valuable know-how without even knowing they are doing it. This idea of spontaneously generated content is an alternative to the notion that you have to have formal know-how projects with extensive, and ultimately, fruitless nagging of lawyers to submit know-how. Without blowing our own trumpet, we have been seen as the firm that perhaps has been the most bold at applying this in law.”

What have you done so far?

“We’ve created a blog/wiki site for KM colleagues in some of our largest clients, which we use simply to exchange ideas with each other. We have a dialogue through this site that enables us to propose thoughts to each other. I think this in an incredibly effective way of sharing ideas and it’s quite revolutionary in that it’s a movement away from the more traditional model of publishing knowledge in a finished, final form. We’re just sharing thoughts, trends and opinions and it’s much more engaging to us and our clients to do this than receive a newsletter or alert that may be very pretty but is probably out of date by the time you get it. I could go onto the site after speaking with you and in five minutes post a topic that came up in our conversation.

What I’ve been saying within Allen & Overy is that KM is not just about standard-form documents and other supports to standardised product lines, it is also about insight creation. This end of the KM spectrum is more like business intelligence. It’s about creating new thinking that we share with our clients, partly to demonstrate our status at the cutting edge in those areas and to build dialogue with senior people in client organisations.”

There’s sometimes been a cultural issue, in that lawyers are reluctant to try out new technologies, or share information with their peers. Is the familiarity of these tools helping to overcome this?

“This work with social software is very much at an experimental stage. The great thing about Allen & Overy is that the firm is incredibly open and collegiate and this comes in to everything we do. I am also fortunate in the amount of senior and managing-partner support that I get for these projects. I am not saying that the experiment will succeed but my feeling is that if it cannot succeed here then it cannot succeed anywhere. I believe that we are dealing with a generation of lawyers who do not feel comfortable with so-called ‘command and control’ approaches to know-how. They prefer to engage with material which they feel has been co-authored by them. Last week we started a ‘Hot Topics’ blog and I invited a number of partners to join. It’s asking partners to share some of their most cherished nuggets of information about where they see markets going, or key developments in their practice. I’d be lying if I said I had been overwhelmed with postings from partners but there is now a steady trickle and I very much hope that this will become a stream before too long. The idea of being able to ‘harvest’ these thoughts for a variety of business development purposes is exciting. I believe that these kind of tools suit the culture at Allen & Overy particularly well.”

So you haven’t had any negative feedback?

“It’s been enthusiastic so far but these are very early days. Why do you think people would be worried about it?”

I’ve heard others discussing issues surrounding the time and resources to manage risk properly, and also that these types of tools are not appropriate to the law-firm culture.

“I think that the risk factors are two-fold. First, the sustainability of these things. If you’re going to commit to these forms of dialogue you have to be pretty sure that this dialogue is going to continue, that you’re going to have enough interesting things to say and keep saying. And that’s the biggest issue with blogging in this environment – you need to maintain ideas and enthusiasm. The other thing, of course, is that firms are concerned about traditional risk management; that people will say inappropriate things on blogs. We are obviously very mindful of risk – we take it very seriously – but we think that we can trust (and this is the vital thing) our lawyers to be responsible when they submit comments. It was interesting when I was speaking at a recent IT conference. Some firms were saying things like ‘We wouldn’t want to have that level of loss of control’; the word ‘control’ kept coming up time and time again. One person asked ‘Are you able to shut down blogs quickly and then re-open them when the content has become appropriate again?’. But the social software revolution – blogs, MySpace, YouTube and so on – is all about a loss of centralised control, even Rupert Murdoch has conceded this. The reality of course is that we lost centralised control of our networks through e-mail, which is just one large repository of discoverable (in a legal sense) material. My own view is that people are likely to be more responsible in what they say in the public setting of a blog than in the ‘private’ world of e-mail communication. The big challenge to firms is whether they are prepared to lose enough control to get their lawyers engaged in knowledge creation and sharing, without being naive about managing risk. I’m a great believer that if you do lose control to a certain extent, you’ll actually empower the lawyers to have a greater sense of ownership of the information that flows within a firm. And this could lead to an enormous growth in the creation and sharing of valuable knowledge. Wikipedia is a great example. Imagine if someone had tried to control that project and set up an international team of experts to write the encyclopaedia. Chances are they would still be on ‘a’ or ‘b’ by now. But just by enabling worldwide access, or in the firm environment, allowing lawyers to author the content themselves, there’s a potential for an explosion of knowledge that we’d never get from a more managed approach to content creation.

At the same time, I think there are a couple of things that need to go with this model. First, you have to have very effective search tools, which enable people quickly to sift through and separate the valuable from the dross in this massive proliferation of content. Also – and I have been challenged on this by our younger lawyers who think a Google-style search should be the way in to everything – I think you still need more managed collections of know-how for those materials (for example, standard form or automated documents) which are vital tools of the trade in the more standardised areas of the practice.”

So it’s a shift from knowledge capture to knowledge creation?

“Exactly. There is a danger in taking the database-centric view. We delude ourselves if we think that incredibly finished, polished databases and repositories of know-how, are the answer. The reality is that only a small percentage of that content is ever accessed by anyone. At the recent IT conference I mentioned earlier, a person from an Australian law firm had done some excellent research on this. He had found that even their most cherished pieces of know-how – what they saw as ‘crown jewels’ – had usage figures of below 20 per cent. When you think how much the big firms spend on supporting that activity, you do wonder about the return on investment. Knowledge isn’t an inert thing that you put in a database. Its value lies much more in its currency and its exchange value, and this of course is a rapidly changing picture. I like social software because it gives you a chance to facilitate and capture this dynamic aspect of knowledge.”

Can you tell me more about the Allen & Overy approach to knowledge management?

“As I said earlier, I still believe there’s an important difference between structured and unstructured knowledge. The material built up in blogs and wikis, and which can be accessed via a search engine, is unstructured. It needs to be distinguished from those very structured resources, the ‘toolkit’, which is the core material you need to do the deal or draft a document. Our approach, currently, is that this latter material resides in a more traditional intranet environment, rather than just being available through a search engine. I’m interested to see whether this revolution will reach the point where lawyers say ‘We don’t need structured views of our knowledge anywhere. We’re happy always to start with a search and work out for ourselves what is relevant to our current need’. My personal view is that we’ll always need more structured collections of know-how, particularly for those areas of legal work that have become very standardised, where lawyers don’t want to waste time searching for material that they know is available on the network. They just want the quickest access possible.

A huge part of our strategy is in understanding that the knowledge needs of lawyers are not one and the same throughout the firm. It’s such an important point and not many people understand it. When they think about know-how, they just automatically think about certain things like standard-form documents, guidance and know-how systems – and that’s not very sophisticated thinking.

If you actually look at the way lawyers work, there are three main strands of activity. One is around the very standardised or ‘commoditised’ areas and this is where you’re looking for traditional know-how interventions. You’re seeking to automate the drafting process and so on. But there are two other things – the middle ground, which we call ‘procedural knowledge’, dealing with areas of law that aren’t sufficiently standardised to give you a sufficient return on your investment from the creation of standard documents and automated drafting tools. Here, you’re looking to improve the exchange and sharing of things like previous deal documents and other expertise. The standardised or commodity end is about giving lawyers the tools they need to do their jobs more efficiently. The procedural area – and we’ve used the term ‘antenna’ – points to better capture of what we already know. It’s not about creating new knowledge; it’s about getting hold of what already exists within the firm. I believe that enterprise-wide searching is key to this. We’re currently experimenting with a Google-style search within a large practice area, across all documentation, not just traditional know-how.

The last category is the expertise end of the spectrum, which we call ‘insight’. That really is new knowledge creation. We’re seeking to communicate insights to our clients on trends in the law and the markets. For example, what are the implications in the banking world of the current phase of more borrower-friendly loan documentation if there is a downturn? Or what will be the impact of new players, such as hedge funds, on inter-creditor relationships in any downturn? I did a lot of work with McKinsey on the kinds of roles and structures you need in a KM function to support this ‘thought leadership’ activity. The big mistake is to think that the people and processes you need for traditional KM work are right for this new activity.” ?

David Jabbari is global head of know-how at international firm Allen & Overy LLP. He can be contacted at david.jabbari@allenovery.com

Box: Curriculam vitae

Name: David Jabbari.

Place of birth: Bournemouth, UK.

Education: LLB Warwick University, BCL Oxford University, Solicitor.

Employment history: Legal academic and solicitor, consultant to law firms, director at Bird & Bird, director and board member at the College of Law, global head of know-how for capital markets at A&O, global head of know-how at A&O.

Personal strengths: I like to think that I am good at both strategy and implementation – often these two skills don’t go together.

Must improve: In the interests of prioritisation, I sometimes need to curb my enthusiasm.

Biggest inspiration: I was going to say something like Martin Luther King but the first person that came into my mind was my wife Kathy, who makes sure I never lose sight of what’s really important.

Highlight of career: My present role at A&O, naturally!

What I do to relax: Season ticket holder at Reading FC. Harley Davidson owner.

Favourite film: Recently, Napoleon Dynamite.

Must read: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – it builds patience.

Best bit of advice I could give: “Before you build a better mouse trap, it helps to know if there are any mice out there”.