Having attended quite a few conferences on this subject over the past few years and subsequently resolved never to attend another again, my somewhat cynical expectations of the CLIG Knowledge Management seminar were that I would spend the evening being baffled by a lot of psychobabble buzz words urging me to ‘leverage knowledge’, find money I did not have to buy software applications I did not understand and to avoid, at all costs, ‘reinventing the wheel’, during which time I would take the opportunity to scoff a few sandwiches, quaff some wine, chat to a few faces I hadn’t seen for a while and roll home again. Quaff, scoff and chat I did, but treated as stupid I wasn’t.

Instead I was treated to refreshingly down to earth advice, given by speakers who were obviously passionate about knowledge management and equally scornful about the amount of nonsense written about it.

First up was Bob Bater, a Principal Associate at InfoPlex Associates. Bob set the context for the evening in his talk ‘Making Sense of Knowledge Management’ by examining the basic premise of knowledge management as a concept, that knowledge for companies is an asset and this is especially true of law firms, who to quote Richard Susskind, “…do not merely rely on knowledge. They sell it as well.”* and by defining eight processes that a successful knowledge management system should be aiming to implement. At the core are the personal processes of Development (improving, refining and combining knowledge), Discovery (browsing and searching knowledge), Deployment (filtering, processing, presenting and sharing knowledge) and Delivery (the retrieval and receipt of knowledge) surrounded by four further processes which facilitate the use of knowledge in a more strategic (as opposed to personal) way. The strategic processes were defined as Storage (recording and storing knowledge), Definition (knowing which knowledge is needed, when it is used, who are the users and what are the users), Acquisition (acquiring, gathering, and generating knowledge), and Description (cataloguing, classifying and indexing knowledge).

With the aspirations of a knowledge management system having been identified, the seminar moved to look at the best ways in which to achieve these. Malcolm Dowden, a Professional Support Lawyer with Charles Russell treated us to a homily verging on the heretical in his talk entitled, “Deconstructing the Wheel”, so called because, as Malcolm put it, “‘Reinventing the Wheel” is the great knowledge management nostrum and myth which makes me fulminate and emit steam from my ears.” Having ensured he had everyone’s attention, and while I began to nervously scour the room for a seat not in the front row, he proceeded to explain why. While the concepts of knowledge, information and understanding are worlds apart, Malcolm’s first point was that, often, when it comes to discussing know-how, law firms fail to make a genuine distinction between knowledge and information. Likening knowledge to glass and sand to information, his analogy demonstrated that information is dead unless a process of understanding is applied to it. Having access to information does not mean that you have access to knowledge, and it follows from this that only after you have knowledge can you reach the nirvana that is know-how, which is really the ability to work with the information provided. However, being that IT departments within law firms are in the business of selling applications to shunt information from one place to another, and partners of law firms are most frequently driven by concepts of budget, process and the fear that they are not keeping up with the Jones Jones & Jones’, the mantra mutates to become knowledge is possession of information. And this is where Malcolm (looking surprisingly calm and collected I noted gratefully) said the phrase “Reinventing the Wheel” inevitably comes in, because of course, by providing endless amounts of information on tap, law firms feel they are allowing plenty of people to duplicate the wheel while never actually reinventing it.

Along with a desire to provide information on tap, law firms also have the tendency to want to “get to the bottom line”, another irksome phrase that Malcolm soon set about pulling apart in his determinedly firm manner. “Getting to the bottom line” always involves the following three things. The first is a wish to move from Embodied knowledge (that which is tacit or retained in the practitioner’s head and includes experience) to Embedded knowledge (knowledge made explicit and shaped into process such as case management workflow charts for personal injury paralegals to use). The whole concept of Embedded knowledge is extremely seductive and will flourish, mainly because it is cheap and therefore in current market conditions increased reliance will be placed on embedded knowledge. Having established an Embedded knowledge process, law firms will then want to ‘commoditise’, meaning getting paralegals to do the work using the embodied knowledge process which leads full circle to reinforce the belief that the ultimate KM solution is having all information on tap – which Malcolm termed as the ‘Magic Box syndrome’.

However, as was pointed out, providing all information on tap does nothing more than drown your lawyers in an indigestible tsunami of data, commonly known as information overload. The paradox is the better the document management system the worse the problem, which leads to the situation where rather than facilitating knowledge you are killing it. An example was given whereby photocopying engineers were provided with laptops and CD-ROMs of the photocopy repair manuals. The aim of this was to cut back on time the engineers spent at the depot, which was viewed as a waste when they could be on the road travelling between appointments if they had knowledge on hand. The net result of this was that productivity actually plummeted due to a community of practice being lost. What the company had failed to realise was that put two or more men in a room with some coffee, and following a discussion of last night’s football game, a brief “how’s the wife?” and “anyone for another coffee?” conversation quickly turned to work and the quickest way to fix a photocopier. Having a manual online via a laptop didn’t provide the same kind of updating of knowledge and it became apparent that reliance upon represented or embedded knowledge had diminished the stock of embodied knowledge.

A further difficulty with viewing the provision of all information on tap as a successful knowledge management strategy is that decontextualised information can never be knowledge. For example, one lawyer can produce a letter radically different from another due to the context in which the letter is produced. The question the letter is addressing may be slightly different or there may be subtle differences due to the relative bargaining strength of the parties. Processes can be anatomised and standardised but you risk the loss of expertise and flexibility. Work can be allocated to an appropriate level but there is a need for active management. So how do we ensure we are not treating information as knowledge and lawyers as automatons?

Malcolm’s conclusions were that in developing knowledge, defining and being aware of the business driver is essential. IT for IT’s sake is not beneficial to knowledge management and can do more harm than good so be aware that IT should not be dictating KM processes and practices. Be open to the idea that one solution may not be the answer, and while information silos need to be avoided, thinking in terms of knowledge systems in the plural is not necessarily a bad thing. Different systems may be needed to suit varied knowledge management purposes. Training is always necessary. And finally, as if we had not been treated to enough unorthodoxy in the previous half an hour, Malcolm suggested that further to his theory that ‘Communities of Practice’ must be retained, they must also be positively encouraged and developed, with information professionals and secretarial staff being involved in transaction reviews to sit down with the lawyers and work through what had actually beenlearnt from a particular transaction by all involved. To which of course the question came, “And how do we persuade people to do that?”, promptly answered with that panacea of all uncomfortable social situations from someone in the audience (to murmurs of approval all-round it has to be said): alcohol. The final point being that it appears, successful harvesting of know-how must be booze-fuelled. Now there’s a theory that will gain ground quite fast I’ll wager.

Last but not least, Derek Sturdy of Granite & Comfrey spoke to us about how to actually get started in Legal Know-How. He identified several major stalling points which would prevent action such as prevarication over which IT systems to use and insistence on 100% perfection created by over-specification and demand for Rolls Royce knowledge management systems. His advice was to start with the taxonomies, stick to only good value know-how as content, so for example don’t go trying to replicate what the legal publishers do when this can be bought in far more cheaply, and be aware that your budget for the first two years will probably be 85% people and only 15% IT. For taxonomies, Derek noted the need to have controlled vocabularies, which offer drill-down functionality and searching capabilities, but warned against creating an 8,000-term taxonomy for 1,000 know-how documents. The solution is to be found in the mantra “Segment and Combine”: the smaller the lists to choose from the greater the accuracy and increased possibility of mixing and matching terms to enable high precision in categorising and searching. If you spend more than five days in creating taxonomies he considered that you would be wasting your time. Instead, don’t ask your lawyers for a list of terms, offer them a working system and then amend as required. Segments were identified as work type or process, standard tasks, know-how or information type, subject or topic, industry or sector, asset type and jurisdiction or geography for multinational firms.

Defining know-how in practice, Derek identified it as best practice (such as precedents, models, guides to using precedents and models, and process maps), seminars and legal practice updates, and customer specific knowledge. To start tackling know-how, the key is to just get going. Its not necessary to start with precedents but a lot of firms view this is a priority and often it creates the obstacle to getting started, in as much as developing an effective knowledge management system is often delayed until such time as the precedents have been sorted out. In sorting precedents, first categorise them by work area and task (e.g. employment contracts, restrictive covenants), then document type (agreement, instrument, resolution). Then add any precedent guidance, categorising them identically to the actual precedent to ensure linking is automated and updated. One issue with regard to precedents is to first agree on the precedent ‘reuse point’, stage one being the original version, and stage six (or the final stage) being that which was agreed between the two parties. This decision allows you to identify the actual precedent documents you would class as ‘the ones’. Use simple storage mechanisms at first, provided you can upgrade as and when necessary.

Derek also re-emphasised Malcolm’s point that IT or software was not the answer to managing knowledge and that realistically, it will always come down to human input and effort, with information professionals and Professional Support Lawyers sharing the burden.

All in all, this was the first worthwhile KM seminar I had attended in a long time, with very practical advice. Now, if I could just find a similar seminar on training lawyers how to search… well, one can dream.

If you were unable to attend the seminar but would like the slides of all three speakers via e-mail please contact Charlotte Russell-Hargreaves at charlotte.russell-hargreaves@reuters.com.

* Richard Susskind, “Transforming the Law”