Equal but separate

Law firms and industry analysts can sometimes underestimate the vital role that KM professionals now play in law firms, especially as IT and business development functions increasingly blur the many sources of a firm’s insight and innovation. BY DAVID JABBARI.

In the last edition of KM Legal Andrew Hedley put forward some very good reasons why smart law firms will seek to exploit the synergies between knowledge management (KM) and business development (BD). Clients are looking for evidence of real expertise and insight, and so leading-edge knowledge matters more and more for marketing and business development.

Equally, the boundary between KM and IT can get blurred. Following Nicholas Carr’s book Does IT Matter?, IT departments have been keen to show that they do more than ‘keep the pipes clean’; they can also be a source of strategic insight and innovation. It’s no surprise that law firm KM leaders are now often invited to speak at conferences for mainstream legal IT professionals to add insight to the agenda.

Is there a risk that in relation to business development (BD) and IT, KM will find itself between a rock and a hard place? Could it be that all routine KM work will be absorbed by IT departments – utilising technology tools such as enterprise search – and that high-end knowledge production and research will flow into BD departments? Does this mean that ultimately the governance of KM could be divided up between other major support areas or, less radically, KM could be merged with BD or IT?

I very much doubt it. The legal KM community should be proud that they are the people who have forced these boundary issues and, in the main, these issues raise more questions about the role and purpose of other support areas than they do about KM. Most often, it has been KM people who have been innovators in key technical areas such as enterprise search and social software. Moving the agenda within law firms away from simple knowledge capture towards the creation of thought-leading content, that can be shared with clients, has often been driven by KM, not BD professionals.

KM professionals should continue to innovate in these areas and continue to push the boundaries in their relation to other support areas. I am convinced that they will end up with bigger not smaller roles as a result. They should be confident that they have a unique skill-set around content creation and its dissemination, anchored in a very strong understanding of lawyers and legal business. This skill-set is increasingly vital as an aspect of competitive advantage and client retention for law firms.

Part of being innovative is to keep looking honestly at the KM function. We perhaps need to recognise that terms like ‘knowledge management’ have not done justice to the vital role that KM professionals are playing in law firms. As our function gets more and more important, I think it likely that it will start to live under different descriptions. Far from pointing to the merger or absorption of KM into other areas, these developments point to a separate infrastructure to support knowledge, albeit one that works extremely closely with colleagues in IT and BD.

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