Peer to Peer Magazine

Increasingly, legal knowledge managers are also supporting budgeting systems and pricing efforts (see "The Pricing Manager" section). They are kin to librarians, but where librarians address the petabytes of information available outside their organizations, knowledge managers focus on what is inside the firewall. For instance, a legal knowledge manager might work on determining best practices for leveraging a document management system or figuring out how a firm's legacy experience management system could best support, or be adapted to support, a firm's pricing and budget-monitoring efforts. While they leverage technology, and typically have a much more sophisticated understanding of their organization's technology assets than practicing lawyers, legal knowledge managers function less as developers and more as an interface between the IT group and the lawyers. Sometimes they also interface between the IT group and other non-legal administrative groups, such as finance or marketing. Not all legal knowledge management professionals are "simply" former practicing lawyers. Some have backgrounds as IT professionals, paralegals or other non-lawyer legal staff. And yes, some are librarians, with or without JDs. This type of work requires creativity, comfort with technology, information management skills, the ability to work well with lawyers and legal staff, and the desire to inspire changes in how legal work is done. THE PRACTICE MANAGER (Lawyer + Project Manager) In U.S. law firms, practice managers and higher-level department or practice-area directors support the practice units of law firms or law department groups. They are the closest thing to a jack-of-all-trades in the legal profession. Practice managers advance the business goals of these units and sometimes implement firmwide strategic goals. The position should allow practice leaders to dedicate less time to group management and more time to billable client work or business development. The work spans marketing activities such as externally facing client development; internally facing capacity development, such as training and practice group meetings; necessary processes like lateral onboarding and partnership process execution; and "making the trains run on time" activities, such as partnership group activity coordination. Occasionally, they work on substantive knowledge management in coordination with knowledge management professionals, and they collaborate with other groups within the firm, such as finance, marketing, HR and professional development. Effective practice management typically draws on a substantive understanding of the type of legal work being managed: a JD and experience practicing in a comparable firm 72 Peer to Peer doing similar work can be a prerequisite (some law firms hire professional business managers to do this work). Practice managers tend to be detail-oriented, preferring to do things rather than come up with the most ingenious approach, but a wide range of personal and professional skills can be brought to bear on this diverse work. Practice managers typically "manage up," particularly when it comes to implementing firm-driven, as opposed to practice-driven, initiatives. This often requires a high level of diplomacy, as they deal with a broad spectrum of personalities among the partners supported. In the U.K. and Australia, the practice support lawyer (PSL) combines many of the practice management and knowledge management functions. The knowledge management aspect of the PSL usually focuses exclusively on practice-level work, such as precedents and outward-facing client alerts, typically without regard for technical solutions for the entire firm's knowledge needs. Effective practice management typically draws on a substantive understanding of the type of legal work being managed. THE STAFFING MANAGER (Lawyer + Counselor) Legal staffing/sourcing is an increasingly important aspect of internal firm management, as the options for who should work on particular aspects of legal matters expand and as work gets multisourced. At some firms, staffing on cases or deals is decided by individual associates and individual partners. At my firm, the decision to insert a legal professional into that negotiation was made well before the current legal market changes, improving the likelihood the matter team obtains the right professional for particular work. This also ensures someone with the ability to alter staffing is paying attention to junior lawyers' professional development.

• Cover