denotes premium content | Dec 3 2008 KIM Legal archive
Volume 1 Issue 1
Editor's letter
Welcome to this launch issue of KM Legal, the first knowledge-management (KM) publication specifically tailored to the legal profession. The challenges and opportunities facing KM professionals in law firms are significant, with debate covering a broad range of issues from the initial value of KM activities to complex KM projects requiring the input of people across the firm. This magazine will provide law-firm case studies, features, profiles, news updates and opinion pieces covering all the issues you need to know to improve both the collection and creation of knowledge across people, processes and systems.
We hope that you will use KM Legal as an essential resource in your day-to-day KM activities, especially as we understand just how difficult the life of a KM practitioner in the legal profession can be. It wasn’t even easy for us to choose the right title for this publication; in our research, some said that know-how better reflected the cultural rather than technology dimension of KM, while others thought the term suggested an outdated document rather than people-centric approach. We hope we have found a happy compromise. At the very least, debate over the title has made us sympathise even more with the KM arena many practitioners face, where even the terminology mightprove problematic.
To make things worse, many fee earners are still sceptical about the basic concept of KM, seeing knowledge sharing as detrimental to their own client practices, which, after all, are still based largely on individual earnings through the billable hour. While many fee earners are still not rewarded for team work and business-management activities, KM will always lose out.
Despite the difficulties of implementing effective KM in the legal profession, however, there are many more positive signs that law firms are now exploiting its potential. As the case studies and features in this launch issue demonstrate, firms are working hard to get the right people in place to develop know-how systems and processes. The role of the professional support lawyer (PSL) has evolved in recent years to encompass ever-broader responsibilities, which are likely to further develop with a focus on PSL training and development among many firms. In addition, firms are investing in the right KM systems and support structures to enable lawyers to deliver the best service possible to increasingly sophisticated clients. And, if KM professionals can prove to lawyers that such support directly benefits their client relationships, any residual battle for fee-earner buy-in will surely be won.
We hope that you find the following articles useful and informative, but as we will be publishing six issues of KM Legal a year, this is only the start. With that in mind, please do not hesitate to contact me with feedback and suggestions for future issues, whether there is a particular KM project or issue you would like to hear more about, or if you would like to contribute an article to a future edition. After all, this magazine should reflect the work of its contributors and truly be about knowledge sharing.
Kate Clifton
Editor
Features
Feature: Professional support lawyers
The legal profession has a reputation for being cautious and slow, but it is actually a clever and innovative world, which is shrugging off its Dickensian reputation. The evolution of the professional support lawyer’s (PSL’s) role in the world of the modern law firm is as sure a sign as any of this.
Case study: Linklaters
The impact of knowledge management (KM) in law firms is judged by the change in behaviours of lawyers in doing their work, and in the quality, consistency, insights, and speed of work delivered to clients. It is not judged by document counts in databases that may sit unknown or unused, or by precedent counts, or the number of training programmes offered.
Case study: Shoosmiths
Shoosmiths recently won the accolade of ‘Management Team of the Year’ at The Lawyer Awards 2006. The basis of the award was not only the firm’s outstanding financial results, but also the strength and diversity of its teams. Integral to the success of the teams is the contribution made by the six professional support lawyer (PSL) members of the firm, who provide support to its 80 partners and 1,300 staff over seven offices.
Cover feature: Making knowledge work
While corporate organisations operating in both the public and private sectors have provided us with numerous knowledge-management (KM) trailblazers, the legal profession has often been described as rather slow when it comes to embracing – and promoting – KM activities.
Profile: Andrew White
When Andrew White, knowledge-development partner at international law firm Bird & Bird, set about developing an innovative know-how resource for the firm’s fee earners and support staff in 2001, he felt that a code name mirroring the huge scope and ambition of the project would be fitting.
View from the inside
I am sure that, like me, you are sceptical of supposed ‘paradigm shifts’ or ‘revolutions’ in knowledge management (KM). Some of these claimed revolutions – such as the shift from knowledge capture to knowledge creation – have endured. The majority have been proven to be fads.
Regulars
The last word
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?
Thought leader
When I became a professional support lawyer (PSL) at SJ Berwin in 1997, many of my colleagues thought I was mad. Who in their right mind would want to step away from the core business into a support role which (at least in my firm) was new and barely understood?
