Digital White Papers

KM PROFESSIONALS: A NATURAL FIT FOR LPM departments as a result of KM projects, and those bridges can be leveraged. These connections and relationships are important in the difficult LPM change management process. LET'S TAKE A POLL With these high-level assumptions in mind, I sought a deeper understanding of the degree and type of involvement KM professionals have in LPM; details on how LPM initiatives, however formal or informal, began; and how those in KM perceive the level of maturity of LPM. To that end, I developed a poll designed to get a few statistics, and I primarily used open-ended questions to get details about what people are thinking and doing. Keep in mind the results from this poll are from a small population, so responses might be different with a larger sample set. In addition, there is no way to know how respondents defined what an LPM program is and what requirements needed to be met in order to consider their LPM efforts legitimate "programs." These caveats aside, we learned quite a bit from the 33 firms that responded. Yes   Yes,  bu No   Yes   Yes,  but  informally   No   0-100 ATTORNEYS 9% 36% 55% 101-500 ATTORNEYS Does your firm have an LPM program? Does your firm have a KM program? We posted the poll in ILTA's KM and large firm e-groups, and 91% of the 33 firms that replied were from medium (101 to 500 attorneys) or large firms (501+ attorneys). 501+ ATTORNEYS collaboration tools, dashboards and result tracking databases, checklists, expert databases, enterprise search, experience management, and CRMs — sound typical of formal KM groups. 81% said yes (31.3% indicated their program is informal), which isn't surprising given the 0-‐100  a&orneys   responses were primarily from large firms. Many 101-‐500  a&orneys   who provided comments said KM is still in its 500+  a&orneys   infancy or that KM is still informal and/or with modest investments, yet the examples of work they gave — including case pages, extranets, portals, 75% said yes, with 43.8% having formal programs and 31.3% having informal programs. Wow! I was surprised these numbers were so high, particularly in the formal category. Having worked in a number of large firms and being part of the active KM community, I would have guessed something like 25% would have formal programs. I found this very encouraging. It's certainly possible that some responders were using a light-weight definition of "formal," and there is always some amount of

• Cover