P2P

11 I L T A N E T . O R G A long time ago, in a galaxy not far away, there lived a young girl named Bárbara, who was born on Star Wars Day 1 . As you may already have guessed by these few introductory words, Bárbara was – and still is – a geek. And, probably because of that, she developed an interest in learning English. Bárbara lived in the northeast of Brazil and, since her early years, she wanted to see the world. But because her parents couldn't afford to send her abroad, she explored other cultures by listening to music, reading books and watching foreign movies and TV shows. When she turned 16, she got her first job at an English course and a few months later she became an English teacher. She has taught for a couple of years, until she graduated from Law school. More than 10 years had gone by and Bárbara was now a lawyer at Rocha, Marinho E Sales Advogados, a renowned law firm with over 900 professionals and 12 offices across the Brazilian territory. Even though Bárbara loved working as a lawyer, she felt like she could make a bigger impact at her firm. However, being a practicing attorney was the only career path she knew at the time. Little did she know that she was about to embark on a journey that would not only show her there was a much broader variety of career options in the legal field, but would also connect her to people from all over the world. Well, this is where my story begins. And what I intend to share in this article is not the ups and downs of my professional life, but rather the experience I have lived in recent years and how it was possible to set up a Knowledge Management function in a law firm from a country where KM is not developed as a practice (at least not in the legal profession), as well as to keep implementing new ideas with the help of my peers across the globe. They say every great dream begins with a dreamer, but even in my wildest dreams I would not have expected to speak – IN ENGLISH! – at a conference along and in front of like-minded people from the legal industry, or to discuss ideas and develop content for the international legal community. The fact is, even when I did not know there was such a thing as knowledge management or a whole spectrum of careers in the legal profession, I was blessed with the opportunity to jump out of law school into a firm that doesn't have a commitment to the past and whose partners are open to experimenting new ideas and doing things in different ways, always in an effort to increase quality, consistency and efficiency to meet their clients' needs. It was only a few years ago that I acknowledged that this is not the way a lot of firms operate and maybe this is why I developed a mindset of learning new skills, questioning the reason why things happen and giving my true opinion to the partners on what I thought needed changing or improving. And instead of telling me to shut up and do my job – because they knew better – they encouraged me to keep learning and questioning, and they kept investing in my education. As a result, we created new roles at the firm and I became what I call "an incubator" to them. My main responsibility was to keep these professionals on track of finding ways to make us more efficient. We started with a couple of business process analysts, who would speak 1. May 4 is often known as "Star Wars Day". It is jokingly said: "May the 4th be with you", in reference to the popular phrase in Star Wars: "May the Force be with you." (Source: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/May_4)

• Cover