The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/163881
smart moves Lawyers and IT: Birds of a Feather by April Brousseau of Stikeman Elliott LLP People often ask me what exactly I do as a knowledge manager. I struggled with my elevator speech for months until finally I started saying, "I translate between lawyers and IT." While knowledge managers do much more than this (and my elevator speech has improved much since), my initial comment is still pretty accurate. One of the primary roles of a knowledge management professional is translation — we meet with lawyers, understand their needs and practices, explain these to colleagues in the technology department, collaborate with IT on the options available and communicate those back to the lawyers. My first major KM/IT project highlighted how important effective communication is to this part of my role. The goal of the project was to build a new and improved database to store and better allow us to leverage contextual information about our clients and matters. The project proceeded in the traditional way — I consulted with different departments and lawyers in the firm to gather requirements and then went to work drafting a document that listed those requirements in detail. What resulted was a giant and slightly unwieldy table in Microsoft Word that listed all the fields the database should have, where the information should come from and where it should go. I reviewed this with my colleagues in technology and then left them the document with the simple instruction to call me if they had any questions. Not surprisingly, they called often and with many questions, and the result was a frustrating experience for both teams. It made me think, how could this have been done better? Minds in Harmony There is much written about lawyer personality types and how they, as a group, tend to differ from the general public in many ways. For example, multiple studies suggest that lawyers tend to be more introverted, risk averse, skeptical, conservative and autonomous than the general population. There is also much written about what can be learned from understanding these differences both for lawyers and the people who work with them. For more on this, I recommend reading Larry Richard's 2002 article, "Herding Cats: The Lawyer Personality Revealed" and the publication from the Hogan 24 Peer to Peer Assessment Project of Lawyer Personality titled "Understanding Lawyers: Why We Do the Things We Do." In the context of knowledge management, lawyers are only part of the equation. Yes, part of our job is to know and understand the needs of our lawyer clients, but an equally important part of our job is to communicate those needs to our technology colleagues and to work together with them on solutions for those needs. In order to do that effectively, it is important to understand some of the common personality traits of technology professionals as well. One of the more well-known tools for assessing personalities is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a tool developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers and based on the Jungian theory that each of us has been predisposed to certain personality preferences. These preferences affect, among other things, how we learn, how we work and our styles of communication. The MBTI profiles individuals on four scales: • Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I) • Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N) • Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F) • Judging ( J) vs. Perceiving (P) According to the MBTI theory, each different combination of preferences can be associated with different leadership and learning styles as well as problem-solving approaches and ways of working. Each set of preferences and associated personality traits can also make someone better suited to certain kinds of professions. For example, the MBTI recommends a career as a lawyer to people with the INTJ combination (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging) and, according to Larry Richard, there is evidence that most lawyers are, in fact, INTJs. What is perhaps more interesting is the fact that the MBTI also recommends careers in information technology for this particular combination of personality preferences, and several studies confirm information technology professionals tend to be INTJs. This means a number of personality traits thought to be common to lawyers are also common to technology professionals, including: