Peer to Peer Magazine

initiatives struggle to gain participation from attorneys, and the lack of tangible incentives to participate is often cited. Firms find asking secretaries to contribute to initiatives critical to the firm's success is often enough of an incentive, as they express a desire for more substantive involvement in and understanding of the firm's discussions and projects. GET THE BEST MILEAGE FROM YOUR RESOURCES In thinking about how secretaries can add value to a firm's knowledge management efforts, it's helpful to look at the question from two perspectives. The first is how to leverage their core skill sets: What do our secretaries do well, and how can that help our efforts? Firms can begin by examining existing workflows. For example, a firm's document management system (DMS) can serve as a tremendous knowledge resource. Although more attorneys perform their own document work, many report they create documents locally and then forward the documents to their secretary for filing into the DMS. Even among those who save their work directly into the DMS, many let their secretary complete the profile information that makes the document a true knowledge management resource. Firms can leverage secretaries in this existing process to help ensure profiles are completed to provide the salient information needed for easy searching, in addition to complying with the firm's best practices and document-naming conventions. Another aspect firms should explore is how secretaries can assist attorneys with KM efforts that, while valuable, often fall to the bottom of an attorney's "to do" list due to time constraints and billable requirements. For example, many decision-makers look to online content, such as LinkedIn, for information about an attorney's experience. However, many attorneys don't actively maintain their LinkedIn profiles or aren't educated on how to optimize a LinkedIn profile to maximize its search value. With training from the appropriate sources, secretaries can help support the firm's efforts to bring their attorneys' expertise to the surface, and take ownership of maintaining those public-facing resources. The second perspective is a bit more challenging: If the goal of knowledge management is to help the firm work more efficiently, how are we tapping into the organizational knowledge of those who aren't attorneys? Introducing *Patent pending Litéra Galaxy is sold pursuant to a license from Litéra Technologies, LLC for U.S. Patent # 7,818,678. 82 Peer to Peer

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