Dancing to the KM beat

When knowledge management is so often seen simply as a technological system implementation, it can be difficult to get the balance between IT, processes and people right. At mid-sized UK firm Morgan Cole, IT forms the backbone of the KM strategy, combined with a simple but careful, firm-specific approach to change management.

By Gillian Watt and Kevin Greer

Unless you have stumbled across this article by some cruel twist of fate, chances are you have already heard of knowledge management (KM) and its many promises and temptations. However, hacking your way through the dense jungle of KM is no easy feat and, admittedly, most of our lawyers don’t have the faintest idea what it actually is. In fact, it’s worse than that. Open your mouth and say ‘knowledge management’ and you might as well be telling them, ‘we’ve decided to burn some money’.

Actually, that’s not quite true but you can’t choose your family and KM does come hand in hand with its ‘evil’ twin: change management. Attempts to change anything significant in any law firm, even one of a modest size like Morgan Cole, takes careful, well-planned change management, hard work and a thick skin – and often a sense of humour.

Therefore, we have adopted a ruthlessly practical approach to KM across the firm.

Challenges
Morgan Cole is a medium-sized UK firm, made up of some 250 lawyers working across six offices and spilt practice areas, in London, the Thames Valley and South Wales. The firm operates in a highly competitive market and recognises that the challenge to use knowledge effectively represents one of the real opportunities to create competitive advantage: a deep knowledge of clients and a thorough understanding of law as it affects their businesses.

One obvious challenge is to develop and implement a common way of working across all six offices. No doubt in common with many other firms with multiple offices, sources of information (whether that is expertise, client contacts or working practices) have become established across all offices and practice areas. Lawyers collect their knowledge in paper format, creating ‘Bibles’ of information, including manuals, guides and precedents. Generally, information that exists in this way is only available to the creators of these documents and their immediate colleagues. At best, copies of the hard-format information can be made at the request of other lawyers or teams.

Perhaps a less obvious step is to understand what it is we actually want to achieve with KM, whether it is the rather abstruse notion of ‘knowledge management’ or simply a matter of common sense. Unfortunately for those of you looking for a straight answer, it’s probably a bit of both. It is very easy to slip into the wonderful world of KM and utterly forget that the rest of the firm expects to see some obvious, demonstrable benefit from its investment in time, effort, people and software, and not endless streams of knowledge-based gobbledygook. Common sense is, therefore, the cornerstone of any KM construction.

Another significant challenge is resources. We don’t have professional support lawyers (PSLs). There, we said it, but let’s not dwell on it. We do, however, have a legal innovation team – made up of qualified, non-fee-earning lawyers with IT skills – and an information-services team of chartered librarians. This team provides all the library and information services you would expect in a competitive, commercial firm and the legal innovation team looks after the legal practice experience and IT skills necessary to make our software perform and produce the results that our lawyers actually want.

Effective KM should address all these challenges.

Dancing to the KM tune
KM is very often directly associated with IT. Many people assume that you cannot ‘do’ KM without IT (usually very expensive systems). That is the path that Morgan Cole has chosen and it has taken a great deal of effort to ensure that it wasn’t the wrong decision.

Over the past couple of years we have been working towards encouraging knowledge sharing using our KM software, such as the know-how system (formerly known as the Granite & Comfrey KHS, but now supplied by solutions provider Tikit) and our intranet (Lawport, supplied by SV Technology). Initially, the received wisdom was that IT facilitated knowledge. As our understanding of KM has developed we have come to realise that the formula is ‘knowledge, therefore, IT’, rather than ‘IT, therefore, knowledge’. This is the common-sense element, but sometimes you don’t see the wood for the trees.

To give some shape to our dreams, while trying
all the time not to contradict our formula, our KM ideas have developed – and continue to be based upon – three main drivers:

1. Storing knowledge – a law firm’s currency is its lawyers. Unless some effort is made to save what they know, its potential value is diminished;

2. Delivering knowledge – using our software as effectively as possible to deliver know-how, such as precedents, guidance notes and client information;

3. Sharing knowledge – enabling knowledge gained by one lawyer to be shared effectively and efficiently across the firm to anyone who needs to, or should, know about it.

Many KM experts would no doubt scoff at the simplicity of this endeavour, but we need to do what is right for Morgan Cole (where we are and where we can reasonably expect to go), not simply what it says in a book.

The most visible demonstration of KM that has emerged at Morgan Cole has been the creation of the ‘knowledge page’ (see Figure 1) on the firm’s intranet. Each practice area has its own dedicated area, so that lawyers have a single point of access to all knowledge relevant to their area of practice. Recognising the need for lawyers to have quick access to commonly used material, the knowledge page has hyperlinks to regularly used resources, such as precedents, guides, training material, subscription and non-subscription web services, as well as a search box for less commonly used material held in the knowledge database.

Two other main features are access to the ‘knowledge exchange’ (simple web-enabled access to e-mail distribution groups) and the ‘submit knowledge’ web form. The knowledge exchange enables short-term knowledge to be shared and published only to those people who are genuinely interested in it, while encouraging a sense of community within specific worktypes but across different offices. By enabling communication within a familiar format – never try to pry a lawyer away from their e-mail, they’ll do nasty things to you – the concept of KM is introduced almost through stealth.
The trick is to apply a process around this communication to capture longer term, high-value knowledge for storage and redistribution.

The web form introduces discipline to the collection of knowledge so that efficiencies can be introduced to what is otherwise a laborious process. It is also a more transparent endeavour, which reassures lawyers that the knowledge they submit does not disappear into a black hole.

Top down or bottom up?
Unfortunately we’re back with the KM doppelganger, change management. Effective KM often requires very significant changes to the way lawyers work. Therefore, in the first instance, change is encouraged by a top-down approach – usually senior management providing threats and incentives. In the longer term, to establish KM as part of the day-to-day business of the firm, a bottom-up style is necessary, which entails willing and effective participation across all levels of our fee earners.

To prepare the ground for the long run, a network of practice-area-based knowledge managers and directors is being established as part of the information-storing process.
This is a learning experience for all concerned and highlights the workflow processes involved – how knowledge is gathered and assessed, where it is held, how it is delivered and the role of the these managers and directors as knowledge champions.

The legal innovation team provides IT support backed up with legal-practice expertise and ensures the software that Morgan Cole has already purchased is used as effectively as possible. This means understanding how the systems work and sometimes making tweaks to enable them to work the way they should – not simply doing what it says in the manual.

We are also beginning to make better use of the skills of our information-services team. They are experts in dealing with sources of legal knowledge and help our lawyers on a daily basis with complicated legal enquiries. The team is well placed to identify current-awareness information and to know those individuals in the firm who would be interested. They are an excellent sounding board for hot topics and giving an idea of what is in demand. Effective integration of information services into the overall KM process will ensure our lawyers gain all the benefits of KM, without experiencing information overload.

Looking ahead
KM is not easy. We’ve done a lot but there is still a long way to go. Have we made mistakes? Certainly, but making mistakes is healthy as long as the lessons learnt are not forgotten.

One way or another, knowledge is the past, present and future of Morgan Cole’s business. With a better understanding of KM, it will be a better firm: more able to service its clients and better positioned to maintain the skills of its lawyers. KM, simply, makes good business sense. n

Gillian Watt and Kevin Greer are, respectively, information services manager and legal innovation manager at UK firm Morgan Cole. They can be contacted at gillian.watt@morgan-cole.com and kevin.greer@morgan-cole.com