ILTA White Papers

Productivity and Priorities: An In-House Perspective on Knowledge Management We are particularly proud of our work that directly helps attorneys support the business. Our trust group asked us to develop a workflow so that business units could submit legal questions and be assured that they are being serviced, and not bottlenecked. Using simple SharePoint workflow technology, we produced a central, highly secure and flexible site for legal questions to the trust group from across the enterprise. Once a question is submitted (using an attractive SharePoint form), all attorneys in the relevant jurisdiction receive an alert and someone takes responsibility for that issue. That step is reported to the business and legal managers, so everyone can see that things are under control. When an answer is ready, it is posted on the SharePoint site so the knowledge is captured appropriately. Everyone is happy with this solution: It is clear which questions are being handled and by whom, and which ones need attention. We built in a process for rush requests, reports require approval, and questions are marked by jurisdiction, entity and the general topic. Productive Cost Reduction Kobo: We introduced the Kobo e-reader with great success at our annual group-wide retreat in the fall of 2011. About 250 people attended from across all of our offices. In looking for ways to manage the distribution of materials to attendees, we could have used familiar cost-cutting methods like double-sided printing for our agendas and speaker notes, or perhaps not printing anything at all. Instead, we saw an opportunity to make an investment in long-term cost reduction, while accomplishing other BMO goals. We gave everyone a Kobo. We made the business case that the Kobo was a business tool to be used to replace various sources of paper. It also supported BMO's green initiatives. We were able to load all conference materials onto the Kobo for immediate use (no printing costs or binders to ship home!) and demonstrate the benefits of e-learning. While the initial distribution was framed as a surprise to generate excitement, we made it clear that the Kobos were not simply gifts — that's not our corporate culture, that's not value, and that's certainly not productive. The KM team then leveraged the Kobo to reduce library spending. We cancelled all standing orders of legislative materials and made it possible for users to download legislation to their Kobos, keeping only a few paper copies of key legislation. We also continue to use the Kobo for a range of productivity-related initiatives. We have centralized our professional development resource materials and made them Kobo-friendly. When speakers are invited to BMO, they provide a slide deck, which we post on our portal. We also make it available in a Kobo-friendly format, so we no longer print the slide deck. Attendees can bring the Kobos to our learning sessions with the slide-deck preloaded, and it's then available for later research. How Law Firms Can Help: Kobos are only one version of portable devices that can be used to hold resource content and legal material. Law firms may wish to canvass their clients to determine which ones have bring-your-own-device programs (including unofficial programs), and how law firms can become key partners in supporting these initiatives. For example, the legal publishing world is slowly beginning to catch up to this idea, and more text books are becoming available as e-books. If law firms are willing to provide subscriptions, their clients will jump at the chance to sign up. Some public libraries have become e-book lenders; law firm libraries could create great business opportunities by doing the same. Firms should continue to develop the delivery of legal content in contexts outside of email messages. This could include further developing an individual firm's app, and search functions would be a great support. Productivity Metrics Ah, metrics. A KM conversation cannot be complete without wrestling with metrics. Legal departments often struggle with metrics, other than the obvious but always important one of external legal spending. But what ILTA White Paper 45

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